By: E&P Staff Bill O'Reilly's column showed up in this Saturday's editions of The Tribune in San Luis Obispo, Calif., after hundreds of readers responded to a survey about dropping the Creators Syndicate columnist.
After years as a fixture in the Saturday paper, O'Reilly's column was dropped from the print newspaper earlier this spring when the Tribune eliminated one page of the opinion pages. The column continued to run online.
In her "Ask the Editor" column, Susan Duerr said that "several readers" strenuously objected to the move, either because they did not have computer access or preferred to read O'Reilly in print.
"So we asked readers to vote yes or no on returning his column to the print edition, noting that we'd reconsider our decision," Duerr wrote. "The response was overwhelming. We received 450 comments via e-mail, phone calls and handwritten letters. Of those, 69% favor the column."
At the same time, Duerr said the responses, pro and con, also prompted the paper to look "for a strong conservative columnist who is well researched, well written and doesn't polarize so many people."
Duerr included some of the reaction in her column:
"We view Bill O'Reilly as a 'straight-talking, no-nonsense, shoot-from-the-shoulder' columnist,'' wrote Jim and Jean Webb of San Luis Obispo. "His view points and observations of 'news happenings' are almost always thought-provoking and mentally stimulating, whether one agrees or disagrees with him."
A sample of the anti-O'Reilly reaction:
"The journalistic joke that is Bill O'Reilly is several layers beneath your fine newspaper, and indeed beneath any newspaper outside of a tabloid,'' wrote D. Duane Wall II of Cambria. "He is a racist, homophobic right-of-right-wing windbag, who invents 'facts' out of whole cloth whenever it suits his purposes."
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