George Will’s column on Bill O’Reilly’s new Reagan book led to this on-air exchange on Friday. O’Reilly insisted that Will had a professional obligation to give him a heads-up about the negative review, and that he himself had an obligation not to interview people who might be biased before writing about historical events in which they were involved. O’Reilly seems to me to be obviously wrong on both counts.
The segment ended with O’Reilly shouting that Will is “hack.”
Several historians of Reagan have also criticized O’Reilly’s book.