Editor's note: This is another in a series of "WND/WENZEL POLLS" conducted exclusively for WND by the public-opinion research and media consulting company Wenzel Strategies.
Bill O'Reilly |
Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly has earned good or excellent job performance rankings from a majority of Americans – but only because Republicans and independents have high levels of support for him and overwhelm a strident negative opinion from self-identified Democrats.
The results come from a new scientific telephone survey of nearly l,100 respondents conducted Aug. 20-22 with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.93 percentage points. It was done by Wenzel Strategies.
The poll indicated that more than 52 percent of Americans describe O'Reilly's work as either good or excellent, based on the 71 percent of the self-identified members of the GOP who put him in that category.
Some 48 percent of independents agreed, but only 13 percent of the Democrats ranked O'Reilly's work as excellent. Another 22.8 percent said his work was good.
The members of the Democratic Party, instead, said by a 56 percent majority that his work was only fair or poor.
"Fox News Channel's no-spin host Bill O'Reilly won a job approval rating of 52 percent, while 38 percent said they disapproved of the job O'Reilly does on his nightly news analysis and commentary program," said Fritz Wenzel, chief of Wenzel Strategies.
"This is no doubt because the Fox audience is larger and broader than [radio host Rush] Limbaugh's and is designed to entertain more points of view than does Limbaugh's program," he said.
Interestingly, those who identified themselves as "very liberal" held a significantly higher opinion of O'Reilly than did "liberals, "moderates" and "conservatives." Only those who identified as "very conservative" had a higher regard.
Among the "very liberal," nearly 53 percent said O'Reilly's work is good to excellent, while for the "liberal," that figure was 31.7 percent. Some 46 percent of moderates held that view as well as almost 53 percent of "conservatives."
More than 73 percent of those who identified as "very conservative" put O'Reilly in the top job performance classifications.
A good opinion of O'Reilly's work was lowest among the Asian/other category, where only 31 percent said his work was good to excellent, and among blacks, where 34 percent said his work was good to excellent. Forty-eight percent of Hispanics said his work was good to excellent, as did 56 percent of whites.
He was supported most by those under 30 and over 50, and his harshest critics were in their 30s, where 45.8 percent said his work was only fair or poor.
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