Moyers, who is 75, had planned on ending his weekly news show at the end of the year, but PBS convinced him to stay on through April 30, 2010. This means, in O'Reilly's fantasy world, that Bill and Jesse totally embarrassed PBS into firing Moyers.

Bill ambushed Moyers again in 2008, but he didn't show that clip, because Moyers upstaged the second-string ambush producer that time.

O'Reilly and his dedicated team at Fox News recently tried to get Lee on the record about President Obama's slipping approval ratings and ongoing trouble in the health care arena. Lee wasn't having it, and simply turned his back on O'Reilly's right hand and our old friend, Jesse Watters. That's because, as Lee told Watters way back at the DNC, he doesn't do interviews with Fox News.

O'Reilly rose above it all, however, and told a little anecdote about how he and Lee were both at a New York Knicks game a few years ago and ran into one another in the bathroom. It was there, nestled among the unzipped masses, that O'Reilly and Lee shared a special moment. Recalled the rascally O'Reilly:

Spike Lee comes walking into the men's room. I'm 6' 4". Spike's is what? 5'2"... So, I'm at the urinal, and Spike kinda saunters up two away from me, he looks up and he goes, 'Did you find any weapons of mass destruction in here?

The news man then remarks that one "has to" give Lee "props" for the line. Props? No, Billy Boy, that's not what you were supposed to do, but we won't spell it out for you. Anyway, it's no wonder Lee doesn't want to do interviews with your news channel.

But, all joking aside, we too will give Lee props: if we saw you all exposed and stuff — well, let's say we would probably have had a different reaction. But trust it would make an equally entertaining story!

Malakoff pleaded guilty to downloading and watching videos of children being raped. According to court documents, "at least 150 images of child pornography" were found on his computer last year by an NPR tech support worker after Malakoff complained that his laptop had been infected with a virus.

Yesterday, according to the Washington Examiner, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle—ignoring federal sentencing guidelines that recommended six to eight years in prison for his offense—sentenced Malakoff to five years' probation, a $5,000 fine, and 600 hours of community service. He must also register as a sex offender.

Huvelle's reasoning, as reported by the Examiner, was that Malakoff had already suffered enough:

In explaining the exceptional step of sentencing below the guidelines, the judge said Malakoff had already thrown away a successful career and has to live with the stigma of being a sex offender for most of the rest of his life. But the strongest argument for the lesser sentence, Huvelle said, was that Malakoff had been raped as a 9-year-old boy and he had looked at the child pornography over five hours last year to relive his own rape.

How ugly and painful and sad. The victim-becomes-victimizer dynamic of sexual abuse is complicated and horrible to contemplate, but—the justice or lack thereof of Huvelle's mercy notwithstanding—we're confident that O'Reilly will gloss over the nuance when he goes batshit over the confluence of NPR, child pornography, and a lenient judge.

We arrived at Watters' house, nestled on a lovely suburban cul-de-sac deep among the winding byways of Huntington, N.Y., bright and early at 6 a.m. Your blogger was accompanied by Gawker video editor Richard Blakeley and P.J. Vogt, a producer for WNYC's "On the Media" who had asked to shadow us for a segment the show is preparing about ambush interviews. We'd traded in the beat-up 1998 Saturn station wagon festooned with Obama bumper stickers that we'd driven on our previous outings for a rental SUV with tinted windows, which was less likely to attract attention in Watters' neighborhood. We parked in a spot down the street from Watters' house with a good vantage point, and waited.

At about 8:45 a.m., Watters walked out on to his driveway with his wife, Noelle, and we hopped out to talk to him. When Watters ambushes people, he rushes at them in a deliberate attempt to rattle them, and asks hostile questions. Not being complete dicks, we decided to approach it differently. We introduced ourselves, said hello, and calmly approached him. He got in his car and drove away. We could have engaged some of the tactics that Fox has used in these situations—by say, running to meet him at his car and positioning ourselves so that he couldn't close the door—but we didn't want to, because we weren't trying to engineer a confrontation. We were trying to engineer an interview.

Even though Jesse didn't submit to that interview, we did get one answer: His hurried departure leaves no doubt in our minds that his ambush tactics have nothing to do with the answers he claims to be seeking from O'Reilly's enemies and everything to do with the theater of humiliation that Fox News thrives on and the us-against-them "culture war" that his boss believes he is waging. If Watters honestly believed that people like ThinkProgress blogger Amanda Terkel and the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg—two targets that he ambushed without even inviting them on O'Reilly's show first—have an obligation to answer for the things they do and say in the name of journalism, he would have recognized that obligation in himself. If he honestly believed that people ought to defend themselves to his cameras, he would have been happy to defend himself. And if he honestly believed that stalking and ambushing is a noble pursuit, he would have treated his own ambushers with professional courtesy and let us use his bathroom. (OK, we wouldn't have let us use the bathroom either.)

But Watters doesn't believe that—he believes the people he stalks are the enemy, to be attacked or evaded as necessary. His segments are just partisan shitfights and grist for Fox's enraged audience. Watters is unconcerned about the accusation that he can dish out ambushes but can't take them, because he knows perfectly well that his ambushes are assaults and not, as Fox's bullshit PR would have it, attempts to get answers. And why would he just sit there and let himself be attacked? So he drove away, like a coward.

We'd been trying to talk to Watters for two months, because we wanted to ask him some questions about his job. Watters stalks and sneaks up on unsuspecting enemies of Bill O'Reilly and peppers them with questions so that his boss can air footage of them appearing to be flustered and confused. He did it to Terkel, a who wrote something O'Reilly didn't like, after tailing her for two hours on a weekend getaway. He did it to Bill Arkin, an NBC News analyst and Washingtonpost.com columnist who wrote something that O'Reilly didn't like, in front of his children after following him for 90 minutes across state lines. And he did it to Hertzberg by laying in wait outside his New York apartment.

Watters has applied the same technique of leaping out of nowhere with a camera, a microphone, and a barrage of tendentious questions to dozens of others, from mayors to judges to governors to members of Congress, all of whom have crossed O'Reilly in word or in deed. When he caught Mike Nifong, the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case, in his bathrobe and slippers outside his home, he later said he thought it was funny. When Watters ambushed Meyera Oberndorf, the mayor of Virginia Beach, Va., at her home and her husband tried to grab his mic, he thought it would make "great TV."

Watters and O'Reilly justify these tactics by saying that because their targets won't submit to interviews, they have no choice but to seek them out: "If they don't come to us," Watters has written, "we'll go to them." That is, as we've noted before, a lie: Neither Terkel nor Hertzberg ever received an invitation to appear on O'Reilly's program.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.In April, the New York Times ran a story on Fox's penchant for ambush interviews. Watters declined to be interviewed for it. We found his refusal cowardly beyond measure, given that his job is to force people who don't want to be interviewed to submit to his questions. We called him up to see if he'd talk to us, and he again refused. We decided that if he wouldn't come to us, we'd go to him. So we drove out to Long Island a couple times to pay him a visit, but because we were a) gentlemen enough to give him fair warning of our intentions and b) fairly incompetent when it comes to stalking people, we whiffed. But we met some of his neighbors, who despite calling the cops on us were very friendly. We also met some representatives of local law enforcement, who despite pointing their service weapons at us were very friendly, and who wished us luck when we told them why we were there.

Though we'd still love to actually ask Jesse questions about why he does what he does, and how he does it, we're done with the 4 a.m. wake-up calls to drive out to Long Island and sit on his house. We've made our point. But that doesn't mean Jesse shouldn't have to answer for what he does. So if you ever happen to run into him—maybe on the streets of downtown Huntington, N.Y., or on the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan from Huntington, or around the News Corp. building at Sixth Avenue and 48th St. in Manhattan, or near his parents' summer home in Pemaquid, Maine—don't be afraid to politely and calmly walk up to him and ask him why he stalks people.

Let us know what he says.

We just left you a voicemail, but thought we'd write you a note as well. It doesn't look like you ever met Tiller, but your colleague Porter Barry stalked him to a gas station in Kansas two years ago and called him a "baby killer," forcing Tiller to call 911. And you did ambush—or "confront," as you put it—his attorney Pedro Irigonegary in Topeka, Kansas in 2006. And you ambushed then-Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius last year to ask her what she thought of Tiller "performing illegal late-term abortions and covering up instances of child rape" in her state. You and your boss Bill O'Reilly waged a years-long campaign to brand Tiller a murderer and criminal who needed to be stopped. Anyone who stood in the way of efforts to stop him, O'Reilly said, "has blood on their hands." After you ambushed Tiller's lawyer, you wrote it up in a blog post for O'Reilly's web site, signing off with: "Keep watching. There will be more."

Wow. Were you right about that! We don't think it's reasonable to hold you and your Fox News colleagues responsible for Tiller's murder, Jesse. But we do think it's reasonable to ask you whether you think your practice of hunting people down to "confront" them might egg on madmen who aren't quite satisfied with the ritual humiliation that your little game offers them. Does it ever occur to you that the cat-and-mouse routines you serve up as you demonize and stalk your political enemies might inspire the people whose barely submerged rage you tap into each night in television? That the mechanics of what you do—choose a target, methodically and deliberately transform them into a villain in the eyes of your audience, track them, lay in wait for them, and then leap out of nowhere to "confront" them—could serve as a road map? That some of your less hinged fans might want to try it out some time because it looks fun? And that while you get your jollies from shoving a camera in people's faces when they least suspect it and without even offering them a chance to come on the program like a civilized human being, some of your viewers might want something a little more substantial out of the encounters?

Just some questions we'd like you to answer, Jesse. You know where to find us. And we know where to find you. Just like you said: "Keep watching. There will be more."

Watters, you will recall, is the producer Bill O'Reilly dispatches to stalk his unsuspecting enemies and jump out at them with a microphone and camera while they are trying to enjoy their lives and calls it journalism. He followed ThinkProgress' Amanda Terkel for two hours while she was on her way to a weekend getaway in Virginia, and tailed the Washington Post's Bill Arkin for 90 minutes across state lines. He jumped the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg outside his Manhattan apartment before the guy had even had his morning coffee. O'Reilly justifies this stalking by claiming that his targets refuse to answer questions on his show, but neither Hertzberg nor Terkel had even been invited—they had no idea O'Reilly or Watters had questions for them before he shoved a camera in their faces. For his part, Watters has refused to talk to both the New York Times and Gawker about his tactics. We found that odd given the circumstances, so we decided to do a little ambushing ourselves.

Since our last visit, Jesse has moved up in the world—about five days after we spent the morning waiting (in vain) for him to come out of his Manhasset apartment last month, he and his wife closed on a $545,000 home on a cute little cul-de-sac in Huntington, NY.

With a little work, we tracked down the new address and spent an eventful Thursday hanging out in the new 'hood. We met some of your neighbors, Jesse—they are lovely people (we mean that in earnest), and we don't blame them in the least for calling the cops on us because they were creeped out by two blogger-looking dudes hanging out on their street all day. Did any of your targets' neighbors ever call the cops on you when you stalked and ambushed them, Jesse? The officer who questioned us while we were parked outside your house was very friendly and didn't try to run us off, and we're curious about your experience. We should compare notes! Especially because the other cop that detained us yesterday pointed his gun at us. Did that ever happen to you? Don't worry—in the end it all worked out. He was a big fan of your work, and he found it pretty funny that we were trying to ambush you. He wished us luck.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.If you just return our calls, Jesse, your new neighbors might not resent you for dragging riff-raff like us into your new suburban idyll, and local law enforcement might be able to spend their time doing other things than dealing with bloggers who just want to talk to you.

You know how to reach us. We'll see you soon, one way or the other. I know you must be having a pretty good chuckle, Jesse, at what amateurs we are at this, especially compared to you. But we work hard, and we don't give up. And we're learning. So it won't be long. Or maybe these furtive attempts are just a Columbo act designed to lull you into a false sense of security. You can't be too careful. Anyway, have a lovely Memorial Day weekend.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.P.S. To anybody who is wondering why we're going about this project so publicly, thereby handicapping our efforts: Watters sneaks up on people. We find that rather rude and creepy, and prefer to let our quarry know that he is being hunted. It's only fair, and it's the difference—actually, one of many—between us and Jesse Watters.

We have Washington Times columnist and Fox News regular Amanda Carpenter to thank for revealing the fake. She wrote on her Twitter page today that "@JesseWatters is a BOGUS account. This is not the real Factor producer Jesse Watters. Block this feed, do not follow. It is an imposter." Later she added that she had spoken to Watters (how'd you get him to talk to you!?) and confirmed. The faker admitted the con job on his page today.

We also have Carpenter to thank for introducing the fake Jesse Watters to the Twitterati. Here she is 10 days ago—in posts she has since removed—announcing Watters' arrival on Twitter and bantering with him about MSNBC's David Shuster, as well as yesterday referencing his account by way of attacking us:
Other people taken in by the fake were followers Rick Sanchez, Bobby Jindal, Fred Thompson, and Darrell Issa.

The fact that Carpenter and others were just as fooled as we were doesn't mean we're any less responsible for getting taken in. But we'd point out that if Watters were willing to answer our questions, we would have learned rather quickly that his Twitter persona was fake.

We're sorry for calling you a liar based on the musings of your fake Twitter self, Jesse. We're not sorry for calling you all that other stuff. See you soon.

Watters, Fox News' stalker producer who's afraid to talk to Gawker, apparently read the questions we asked him yesterday. And via Twitter, he says he doesn't have to answer to us. UPDATE: Jesse Watters' Twitter account is fake.

We think you're missing the point of this exercise, Jesse. The fairly simple idea here is to apply to you the same rules that you have repeatedly applied to others. So, as per the Jesse Watters School of Ambush Interviews, you no longer get to decide whether or not to answer our questions. It wasn't up to Hendrik Hertzberg, or Amanda Terkel, or William Arkin, or a host of other people you ambushed. So now it's not up to you. And as for our "sordid, trashy voyeurism"—well, your employer's publicists have found gossip sites useful enough when Fox wanted to spread damaging information about its enemies.

Watters also responded on Twitter to the lie we caught him telling yesterday when he said he doesn't consider his interviews to be ambushes. We pointed out that O'Reilly proudly used that term on the air and online, including a time Watters got wistful about one of his "funnier" ambushes.

Well OK then. Young Watters has clearly been a careful study of the lie-attack-lie Fox News playbook.

UPDATE: Jesse Watters' Twitter account is fake. But the questions we want him to answer are real.

One of Watters' fans wrote this on his Twitter page in reference to Watters' cunning escape from this morning's attempted Gawker ambush: "escape and evade. Live to ambush another day."

Watters responded: "I don't consider what I do 'ambushing', but thanks for the support."

All right, then. This is from a 2007 interview with Watters, conducted by his boss Bill O'Reilly and aired on his network, Fox News Channel:

BILL O'REILLY, HOST: "Back of the Book" segment tonight, ambush journalism. As you may know, "The Factor" occasionally sends out producers to confront people who will not answer serious questions about controversial things they do, like judges giving child rapists probation, for example.


Now, some object to displays like these. But we feel they're a vital tool in holding public servants accountable for their actions, and we do not go after people lightly. We always ask them on the program first, or to issue a clear statement explaining their actions.


With us now "Factor" producer Jesse Watters, one of our field guides.

In 2007, Watters himself wrote a post on O'Reilly's blog about his unannounced interviews. It was called "Producer's Notebook: Ambushed."

Watters ought to get his story straight. He also ought to be held accountable for what he does. For the record, our attempted ambush this morning was distinguished from Watters' way of doing business by the fact that we announced, on this blog, the very fact that we were trying to ambush him. It sort of undermines the whole point of an ambush, but we thought it was the gentlemanly thing to do. In that spirit, and to remind people why we are doing this, we've also decided to give Watters a head start on the questions we will ask him when we find him. Which we will.

• Is everybody compelled to defend their ideas and actions on television to Bill O'Reilly simply because he desires that they do so? Why doesn't Mike Hoyt, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, whom you ambushed on his way to work after he said he was too busy to do the show, have a right to decline to appear on your program?
• Why did O'Reilly lie by saying that Hendrik Hertzberg "refused to come on 'The Factor'" last December, when in fact Hertzberg had received no invitation to appear on the show? And why did you participate in that lie by showing up at Hertzberg's home, without warning, to interview him on camera under the false pretense that he would not submit to a formal interview? Why didn't you just invite him on the show?
• Why did O'Reilly lie by saying that he contacted ThinkProgress, the nonprofit that employs blogger Amanda Terkel, before he sent you to ambush her? And why did you participate in that lie by following Terkel from her home in the Washington, D.C., area for two hours and then confronting her outside a hotel in Virginia while she was on a weekend getaway? Why didn't you just invite her on the show?
• How can you refuse to defend your tactics to us, or to the New York Times, when you have repeatedly harassed other people in your efforts to force them to defend themselves? What makes you less accountable for your actions than Hertzberg, or Terkel, or Hoyt? Why are you and O'Reilly permitted to have your questions answered, whenever you like, by anyone you seek to question, while no one else may question you? Aren't you a coward?
• Why didn't you identify yourself as a Fox News employee who was there to gather audio for a television program when you entered the GE shareholders' meeting this week in Florida under the pretense that you own GE stock? Why didn't you alert the participants that you were recording the conversation?
• You wrote that when you ambushed Mike Nifong, the prosecuter in the Duke lacrosse case, "it didn't register until then that I had gotten him on camera in his bathrobe and slippers. As serious as the legal circumstances were, I couldn't help but smile." Why did you smile? Do you think it's funny to capture people on camera in their bathrobe and slippers by sneaking up on them? Is that why you do it?
• You wrote that when you ambushed Meyera Oberndorf, the mayor of Virginia Beach, Va., you were "trying to elicit an emotional response from her." Why? Weren't you trying to get answers to your questions? Why were you trying to rile her emotions? After her husband confronted you and tried to wrestle your microphone away from you, you told your crew that "this will be great TV." Is that why you ambush people? Because physical confrontations and emotional women make "great TV"?
• David Tabicoff, your fellow producer at the O'Reilly Factor, told the New York Times, "We're trying to get answers from people. Sometimes the only way to get them is via these methods." Has anybody, ever, actually answered a question during one of your ambushes? Is the point to get answers, or is to get embarassing footage of you chasing them, hounding them, and peppering them with questions? Because if it's the latter, that would help us refine our tactics when it comes to interviewing you.

Know something we should know about Jesse Watters? Email me.

Watters makes a living startling enemies of his boss Bill O with a video camera and coming back with embarrassing footage that O'Reilly pretends is "news." But in an act of pure weeniness Watters refuses to discuss his work with anyone. We thought we had a good chance of finding him leaving his house for the office this morning, but not everyone can be a stalker extraordinaire like Watters.

A tipster has passed on info (or misinformation!) from a source inside Fox that says Watters is at his desk, and that his wife—a Gawker fan, according to a different tipster—is quite worked up over the visit.

Our team learned some valuable lessons: 1) a stakeout's best done on an empty bladder and 2) be sure to cover all possible exits. (If he's not still at home, we think he either slipped out when John and Richard went to the loo, or walked out a back way to the nearby train station.) Rookie mistakes happen. And, Jesse, your taunts only make us more determined.

In the meantime, we'll be making a careful study of the master at work.

If you have any info on Jesse and where we might find him, please pass it on. Or, you know, Jesse, you could just return John's phone calls.

So we left for a potty break, giving him a chance to flee. We don't know if he did, but we'll hang out for a while.

So far, we've seen neither hide nor hair of Watters, but we love his neighborhood! Quaint, old Long Island. We think we saw his wife Noelle leaving at 6:30, but positive ID will have to await the video, which we are working on presently. If it was her, it's kind of strange that they wouldn't commute into Manhattan together since she also works for Fox News.

Still, Watters could have evaded us by hopping a fence in the back of his building and walking to the train, or he could simply be holed up inside. He didn't answer the doorbell when we rang it around 9:30. We called Watters' office again in case he made it past us to reiterate our request for an interview, and left a voicemail. We also left one with Fox News publicist Irena Briganti. We also tried to get a message to Watters through a neighbor, but the neighbor didn't want to talk on camera. So we let him go on his way without badgering him or following him.

We're still collecting anything you might know about Jesse — especially his whereabouts — so please keep your tips coming.

We know what you're thinking, Jesse—we're so not pro at this stalking thing! But give us time. We're learning. See you soon!

This apartment building is the last known address for both him and his wife according to publicly accessible databases. (And because some of you thought the original photo was a Google Street View snap, here's a fresh pic.) We've got a video camera, and we'll let you know if we find him.

[Update: Watters appears to have eluded us ... for now.]

Watters, as you may have read, likes to sneak up on people without warning and ask them questions so that O'Reilly can air video of his enemies looking aggrieved and flustered. He's done it to the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, the Washington Post's William Arkin, Think Progress' Amanda Terkel, and others. Watters tailed Arkin for an hour-and-a-half, from Vermont to Massachusetts, and attempted to interview him in front of his children (Fox, always gracious, digitally obscured their faces). He famously followed Terkel, who is a rather slight young woman, for two hours from Washington, D.C., to rural Virginia on a weekend getaway. In all of the above cases, Watters' intent was to question his targets about things they had said or written.

More recently, Watters attended a GE shareholders' conference under the pretense that he owned shares of the company. During a question-and-answer session, he asked GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt about MSNBC's political leanings, and accused the network of airing hateful speech. He failed to announce himself as a Fox News employee and secretly recorded the exchange so that O'Reilly could broadcast it as evidence of a shareholders' "uprising" against Immelt.

In a recent New York Times story, Fox attempted justify its tactics by saying that it invited the targets to appear on O'Reilly's program, and that they had declined. Since O'Reilly's desire was to force them to defend their ideas to him, the only other option was to seek them out, without warning, at their homes or public places. As Watters put it in a billoreilly.com blog post quoted by the Times: "If they don't come to us, we'll go to them." This is, at least in the case of Terkel and Hertzberg, a lie: Neither of them received an invitation to go on the program before Watters showed up with his camera.

The Times quoted Watters' blog post because it couldn't speak to him directly: "The Fox News producer responsible for most of the ambush interviews, Jesse Watters, refused repeated interview requests," the paper wrote.

We found it odd that Watters would refuse to talk to a reporter, given the lengths to which he goes to compel others speak to him. And as you can hear in this audio, unlike Watters' typical m.o., we called him to ask him about it yesterday. He transferred us immediately to Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti, for whom we left a message.

Later yesterday, Briganti called us back. When we informed her that we were recording the conversation, she refused to talk. (Incidentally, that's Fox News' Roger Ailes pictured, because we couldn't find a picture of Briganti.) Later, via email, Briganti indicated that Watters refused our interview request. So we decided to track him down and ask him about his ambush interview tactics face-to-face.

If we find him, we'll post the video as soon as we can. If we don't, we'll keep trying, and for that we'll need your help. What do you know about Jesse Watters? Did you go to college with him? Do you ride the train with him? Do you work at the Starbucks where he buys his coffee? Let us know. We'll get you started:

Watters was born in July 1978. He was raised in Philadelphia, graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., in 2001, and has been a producer for the O'Reilly Factor since 2003. Before that, he spent about four months in 2002 working on federal judge Dora Irizarry's losing campaign for New York Attorney General (making less than $12,000 per year).

He is married to Noelle Watters—maiden name Inguagiato—who works at Fox News as well, as the host of something called iMag Style on Foxnews.com. They live together in Manhasset, N.Y.

If you see him, snap a camera phone picture and send it to us. Or better yet, ask him why he stalks and ambushes people that his boss disagrees with, and tell us what he says. Two years ago, during an on-air celebration of Watters' ambushes, O'Reilly had this to say about his young charge: "Jesse Watters, everybody. He's becoming a big star all over the world."

Let's make that happen.

This is interesting in light of the fact that Fox has made a practice of stalking people who refuse to come on the Factor Zone and face Bill O'Reilly's tough-but-fair stream of sexual innuendo. A Fox producer recently explained the tactic to the New York Times: "We're trying to get answers from people.... Sometimes the only way to get them is via these methods." Jesse Watters, another Fox producer who actually has the job of following slight young women for hours while they go on weekend trips with their boyfriends and then ambushing them with a camera crew even though they never had any idea that Fox wanted to "get answers" from them because they were never asked to come on O'Reilly's show, has summarized it thusly: "If they don't come to us, we'll go to them."

When the reporter who wrote the above-mentioned Times piece tried to "get answers" from Watters, the big-talking manly man declined. But at least Fox was willing to put someone up to defend themselves.

No such luck for NPR. Said host Michel Martin:

And I should mention at this point that we asked Fox News for a representative to come on the program to characterize how they view their coverage of these tea parties. We worked at it all day and after repeated requests, they declined to provide a guest or issue a statement or assist in our conversation in any way. So, I think it's fair to point that out.

And balanced!

The official line at Fox News, you see is that the network sometimes tries not to pointlessly stalk and harass people. It sometimes uses ambush interviews as a last resort.

[Fox News producer David] Tabacoff - who started a telephone interview by asking, "This is going to be a fair piece, correct?" - said the interviews are "part of the journalistic mission" of The O'Reilly Factor...



"We're trying to get answers from people," he said. "Sometimes the only way to get them is via these methods."

(Emphasis added.)

Other times, then, Fox producers must be spending "days... waiting in trucks and hotels" for the sheer ratings value. Such was the case with Amanda Terkel, the Think Progress blogger who was followed by Fox News from her apartment across state lines into Virginia, where she and a friend were accosted by a cameraman and O'Reilly Factor producer.

Fox didn't so much as try to call Terkel or come to her office, she said on MSNBC a few weeks ago. (See attached clip.) The network just went straight into a manhunt.

Perhaps Fox News should just admit it will take a camera anywhere, at the drop of a hat, in order to keep viewers entertained. People don't hold that sort of behavior against, say, TMZ. Do they really expect much better from The O'Reilly Factor?

For example: where Amato instructs you to memorize the URL of The Smoking Gun's transcript of the O'Reilly sexual harrassment suit, so that you can repeat it on camera, we'd recommend making sure they get no usable footage by simply shouting the following things:

• "Falafel."
• "FUCK IT, WE'LL DO IT LIVE."
• "Cup your hands under your breasts and hold them for ten seconds."

Also please consider this post our open invitation for Bill to sent Jesse after us! It'd be an honor. A hilarious honor. (Now it will never happen, of course.)