Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly has some strange ideas about energy prices, but he remains a popular — and quite wealthy — television demagogue. This Cathy Young/Reason article sums up O’Reilly’s demagogy well:

OíReilly has not lost the independent streak that sets him apart from GOP apparatchiks like Sean Hannity. But shrill, intolerant rhetoric has almost entirely eclipsed intelligent discussion on his show, and his pugnacious but likable populism has given way to a paranoid and venomous self-aggrandizement.
OíReilly cultivates an image of a giant almost single-handedly fighting for ìthe folksî against slimy politicians, elitist journalists, nutty professors, namby-pamby judges, and greedy corporations. Sometimes he champions unquestionably good causes, such as the rights of abused children. But even then, he undercuts his own stance with grandstanding and selective presentation of facts.

Meanwhile, this Jacob Heilbrunn/NY Times Book Review article reviews Marvin Kitman’s The Man Who Would Not Shut Up (St. Martin’s Press 2007), which tracks O’Reilly’s career as a local television news reporter into wealthy demagogue. Heilbrunn notes:

“[T]here is something more than a little nonsensical than a little nonsensical in OíReillyís lachrymose nostalgia about his humble origins, as well as in his self-important declarations about his heroic battle to save America from the cultural elites.” [. . .]
. . . OíReillyís struggle isnít about conservative ideas. Itís about parading his seething personal resentments in order to become the very thing he purports to despise: a celebrity.