Reply #16: Is O'Reilly the heir apparent to the late Morton Downey Jr?

[hlthe2b]

For those youngsters who don't remember (from CNN archives, no longer active so I'm taking a couple of liberties in presenting more):

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Morton Downey Jr., the chain-smoking, combative
talk-show host who reined over so-called "Trash TV" in the 1980s, has died, his daughter Tracey said Monday night. He was 67.
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Downey, who lost a lung to cancer in 1996, was known for deliberately
blowing smoke into the faces of guests who annoyed him. After his cancer surgery, however, he spent his final years as an anti-smoking advocate.
--snip--
In his heyday, he was known as "Mort the Mouth," who mocked his sometimes bizarre guests, calling them "slime" or "scumbucket."
He reveled in shouting matches with members of his studio audience, as well,and often dismissed liberals as "pablum pukers."

He said later he took things too far.

"It got out of control because the producers ... wanted me to top myself every night," he said in the early 1990s. "If I did something outlandish on Monday night, on Tuesday night, we'd have to think of something even more outlandish. And after awhile, you work yourself toward the edge of the trampoline and you fall off. I fell off a number of times and I found it very displeasing."

That effort to top himself every night led to perhaps the biggest
embarrassment of his career when he claimed neo-Nazi skinheads attacked him in San Francisco, cutting off his hair and painting a swastika on his head.

Authorities could never verify the attack, and Downey's critics pounced,calling it a publicity stunt.

Still, Downey was proud of many aspects of "The Morton Downey Jr. Show."

He took credit for creating the talk-show format embraced today by Jerry Springer and others like him, although he said he never went as far in his day as Springer does.

"Everyone says, 'Well, Springer's doing your show now,"' Downey told an interviewer in 1998. "That's not true. I didn't do sleaze. There were times that I did things that were a little sleazy, but I didn't do shows on myneighbor's collie dog having sex with my neighbor's wife."

Although sometimes outrageous, he defended his show as giving a forum to
working-class Americans who were fed up with what politicians in Washington,
D.C., were doing with their tax money.

"It isn't the rich people who come up and say, 'Oh Mort, you're just
great,"' Downey one said. "It's the blacks and the ethnics and the blue collars, those guys with too much hair on their shoulder blades. They want some answers."

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(if you can find it at CNN archives-- my link is no longer active)