New York Times Reacts to O'reilly Obama Interview Before Super Bowl.

Amazingly, Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote what I consider to be a fair assessment of Bill O'reilly's interview of President Obama. I suppose what I mean by 'amazingly' is that the New York Times printed it.

New York Times, February 3rd, 2014

WASHINGTON — Some of the hardest hits of Super Bowl Sunday came a couple of hours before kickoff.

In keeping with his tradition of appearing on the network broadcasting football’s championship game, President Obama found himself confronting a full-scale blitz by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.

In the interview, conducted live before the game, Mr. Obama was grilled about the botched rollout of the health care law, his discredited assurances that anyone who liked their insurance could keep it, the attack on the American post in Benghazi, Libya, and the Internal Revenue Service scrutiny of conservative groups.

His answers shed little if any new light on some of the most controversial moments of Mr. Obama’s presidency, but it was a feisty 10-minute encounter that exposed the different world views of Mr. Obama and some of his sharpest critics.

For Mr. Obama it may have been an unpleasant duty that was more or less unavoidable but for some conservative fans of Fox, it was an opportunity to watch the president challenged in a way they believe he has not been by the rest of the news media.

Mr. O’Reilly, sitting forward in his chair at the White House, pressed Mr. Obama repeatedly. The president, smiling but seemingly trying to keep his patience, pushed back in kind. At times the two men talked right over each other.

When Mr. O’Reilly asked if the broken promise on keeping health plans was “the biggest mistake of your presidency,” Mr. Obama responded, “Oh, Bill, you’ve got a long list of my mistakes of my presidency.”

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