For this week’s Chronicle/SF Gate column, I developed my drive-by post about the Bill O’Reilly lesbian gangs segment into a full-on exploration of the piece — discovering some extremely interesting, underreported items along the way. In the same way as driving by a car crash and slowing down, peering into the stories Fox News exploited for their piece revealed at least one very serious issue and a whole mess of pathological propaganda. I’m especially proud of the column this week, and I think you’ll enjoy several aspects of the article. My favorite line: “Hey, I know that Fox News, like porn, is just entertainment, and should never be taken seriously. But I worry about the women and children that are being exploited to fund this billion-dollar-a-year industry.” The mail I’ve gotten is hilarious and overwhelmingly positive; I’ll update this post with emails in a bit. Snip:

I was chillin’ in the hood, kickin’ it under the rainbow flag with my homegirls, sippin’ a 40 and working up to find some schoolkids to indoctrinate and go teach some straight people a few lessons, when it hit me. That square do-gooder O’Reilly had blown our cover. His recent Lesbian Gangs segment on Fox News, where he exposed a national network of lesbian and gay gangs, had the world’s eyes spun in our direction like a chamber packed with one bullet, and all I could do now was spill a little Smirnoff Ice on the corner of Market and Castro for my fallen homos.

Actually, the segment was the funniest thing I’d watched all week, and I wondered how Fox News had managed to borrow the Daily Show’s writers for some good ‘ol news-as-fake-news comedy. In the Lesbian Gangs segment Bill O’Reilly reported on the epidemic of lesbian and gay gangs he assured us is sweeping the nation. Beginning with Dwayne Buckle (”attacked by a lesbian gang here in New York City last August.”), then careening into a “lesbian gang” in Tennessee “called GTO: Gays Take Over” who are “raping young girls” and then to Philly, where ” a gang called DTO “‘Dykes Take Over’” are allegedly terrorizing people as well.” This was lurid, exciting — this was Weekly World News on airplane glue and Anal Eze.

But really, who will protect the straight people’s children from lesbian rape? There’s a new detective on that beat, and it’s O’Reilly (finally proving there’s a reason detectives wear trench coats). O’Reilly anchored his entire segment on the Dwayne Buckle / Lesbian Seven case, lest it be forgotten in the history of homosexual lawlessness. Left out of the Lesbian Gangs segment were the case’s details: Buckle harassed seven women on the street in the East Village last August. According to written statements by a community organization (FIERCE) that has made a call to action to defend the four women, as well as verbal accounts from court observers and evidence from a surveillance camera, Buckle spat on them, followed them, flicked a lit cigarette at them, accosted one of the women and pulled out her hair and told them he’d “f– them straight.”.

It was all captured on video, video that, ironically, played in the background during O’Reilly’s piece. (…)

Link.

Update: Rod Wheeler has an apology on the front page of his website — saying he’s sorry to Pink Pistols and for the exaggerated gang numbers, though not for anything else, like all the creepy sexual indoctrination stuff about gays (which we now see was *clearly* false). And O’Reilly ate a little crow, with an extremely weak apology to GLAAD’s Rashad Robinson, who he had on his show in a moment of true O’Reilly teeth-gritting. It really looked to me like O’Reilly was under pressure to have to allow the guy to finish his sentences, and still, O’Reilly couldn’t resist talking shit saying, “I’m not in fear of the lesbians beating me up.” I’ll bet he’s not.