Accuracy in fact, fairness of point of view, balance in reporting, impartiality and objectivity -- essential ingredients of professional journalism, right?

Last night a friend and I sat in our living room in Cork City, Ireland, and loaded YouTube to watch the apparently notorious and overwhelmingly popular (amongst the U.S populace) Bill O’Reilly being ‘outfoxed.’

Bill O’Reilly, I was told, is a prime-time presenter with FOX News, a man whose journalism practices challenges the journalistic ethics of fairness and balance -- to say the least, the very least -- just as FOX News itself has been accused of.

We watched this proverbial media giant (both in ratings and physical stature) interviewing the son of a 9/11 victim who signed an anti-Iraq war petition after his father’s death, which blatantly did not bode well with O’Reilly.

The interview, controlled to a greater extent by the interviewee because he apparently had studied many tapes of O’Reilly, cumulated in O’Reilly shouting the teenager down and vociferously threatening to boot him off the set, his set as he described it.

We watched a few more, an interview with Senator Barrack Obama, a former talk-show host with another station and Marilyn Manson, who, by comparison to Obama, O’Reilly treated quite saccharine.

While my friend was largely aghast at O’Reilly’s interview techniques, bias and fondness of projecting his own opinions, I was at a loss to comprehend how in terms of principal a man such as Barrack Obama, who obviously possesses deep-seated intelligence and rationality, would contemplate giving a mouth-piece of Republican rhetoric like O’Reilly the time of day. The answer of course is obvious: to decline is to distance from potential voters.

But what if Barrack Obama had declined the interview, extending the nine-month period of absence from O’Reilly’s show indefinitely and taking a stand of principal? Could he have gained votes through good old-fashioned respect? Or are those qualities just for molly-codgers living in the past, like me?

Out of interest, I decided to learn a little about O’Reilly’s employer, Keith Rupert Murdoch. Having been unable to find any information about his previous two wives on Google, I watched an enjoyable hour-long interview by NBC’s Charlie Rose, a kind of Mastermind meets Parkinson, enjoyable largely because the questions put were unchallenging, allowing Murdoch to air views which could only be voiced by a master of the world that he is.

Discussing his history in Britain led to current Anglo-American relations, culminating in Murdoch’s view that making jokes against and drawing cartoons of George Bush was ‘ignorant, ugly and wrong,’ coming from a guy whose newspapers do just that against other leading figures across the world. Murdoch continued stating there had always been an ‘elite British attitude of looking down their noses at the Americans’ and the average working-class person was pro-American, that they went to Disney World on their holidays. Murdoch, an Australian by birth, is an American citizen and I presume Rose is too.

Murdoch’s interview seemed a macrocosm of O’Reilly -- the acceptance of corporate winners, and power cannot be objectively challenged. Sure, some sections of British society might have superior views, but this alone cannot account for a word on the street that Bush is a phoney -- a word so loudly spoken even the Lords in their House must have heard it -- or a million people gathering on the streets of its capital in protest of Britain’s involvement in a war predominantly perpetrated by George Bush.

Continuing the chain of American media exploration, I watched Charlie Rose interview Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an interview Mr. Rose had to cut-short a vacation in France to conduct. Either Mr. Rose was annoyed his holiday time had been disrupted or he could not conceal his personal view that Iran presently posed a significant threat to the Western world, as he concurred with Mr. Murdoch.