Rafael Román Martel

O’Reilly was forthcoming with the fact that he had taken her statements out of context. “What I did not know at the time was that Sherrod told the story to make” the point that she had learned from her mistakes, he explained, playing another clip from her speech in which she explains how her perspective on race has evolved. “I owe Ms. Sherrod an apology for not doing my homework.”

O’Reilly’s segment on Monday was one many detractors of Fox News pointed to as evidence that the network was pushing the story, despite airing during the channel’s designated opinion hours and the network’s news division abstaining from covering the story at all before Sherrod’s resignation, and Sherrod’s case didn’t appear on the channel before O’Reilly’s segment despite the fact that the story broke on Big Government in the morning.

But that’s about where O’Reilly stops being nice to her. He then continued to attack her for describing the white lawyer she sent the white farmer to as “one of his own,” calling that kind of language divisive. He also pointed out that she is a “long-time liberal activist who actually sued the Department of Agriculture and won $300,000″ and that, “even knowing that, the Obama administration hired her in 2009.” He concludes that, despite the fact that she was treated unfairly, there are other elements to her story that make her ineligible to serve in the government. “Should she be doing the people’s business with that resume?” he concluded. “I don’t think so.”

O’Reilly also took the opportunity to take on the “despicable Media Matters,” argue a point similar to CNN’s Campbell Brown’s last night that the NAACP’s “own incompetence snookered them,” and even got to take a shot at Rachel Maddow, playing a clip of Maddow explaining that “Fox does what Fox does.” O’Reilly completed the sentence for her: “…which is kick your network’s butt every night.” Which, if ratings were the issue at hand and the sole reason for a cable news organization’s existence, then, yes, this is empirically true.