NEW YORK (AP) -- Bill
O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera said Friday there were no
hard feelings after they engaged in a shouting match
unusual even for a cable opinion program where the
volume is frequently set to loud.
No chairs flew and no noses
were broken. But the finger-pointing verbal duel over
illegal immigration on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly
Factor" Thursday night became a water-cooler topic the
next day.
"Geraldo is a friend of mine
and I think I respect him even more now, if that's
possible, than I did before," O'Reilly told The
Associated Press on Friday. But they disagree
passionately on the issue, he said.
"I've known him for 25
years," O'Reilly said. "Geraldo doesn't come on to pick
a fight."
Rivera said his sensitivity
to a "massive witch-hunt" against illegal immigrants set
him off Thursday.
The two men were discussing
the case of Alfredo Ramos, a man charged with
manslaughter and suspected of being drunk when his car
crashed into another in Virginia Beach last Friday. Two
teen-aged girls were killed. Ramos, a Mexican who has
been in the United States seven years, is allegedly in
the country illegally.
"He doesn't have a right to
be in this country," O'Reilly said. He said he wanted
immigration laws enforced while Rivera favored
"open-border anarchy."
Rivera said O'Reilly
shouldn't be turning a drunken driving case into an
illegal immigration issue.
"Don't obscure a tragedy to
make a cheap political point," Rivera told him.
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Rivera told the AP he has a
particular sensitivity to the issue. His father, who
came to New York from Puerto Rico in 1940, used to watch
the news and pray that people who committed a crime
weren't Puerto Rican, he said.
"I think that illegal
immigration is the gay marriage (issue) of this
political season," he said.
Rivera, who is a guest on
"The O'Reilly Factor" once a week, said he doesn't come
on to be cowed or bullied by the host's opinions.
O'Reilly called him after the taping to say, "that was
lively, eh?" he said.
"We're friends off camera,"
he said. "On camera, the fact of the matter is that we
disagree on so many things that it always makes for good
television."
Rivera was host of a daytime
syndicated talk show famous for its liveliness, where he
even had a nose broken in a scrum. He's been working for
News Corp.-owned Fox News since shortly after the 2001
terrorist attacks, and recently had a daytime syndicated
news show produced by Fox canceled.
His on-camera duel with
O'Reilly seems to have struck a chord, judging by the
requests he's getting to talk about the issue, Rivera
said. The tape was played a couple of times Friday on
ABC's "Good Morning America."
At one point in the debate,
Rivera told O'Reilly, "don't be ... Lou Dobbs' mom." CNN
anchor Dobbs has made a crusade of illegal immigration
on his program the past year. That was a new insult even
for a TV host used to them.
"I have been insulted by
your organization and many other organizations,"
O'Reilly told the AP, "so nothing I hear surprises me." |