Bill O’Reilly expressed regret over his infamous exchange with Barney Frank in the wake of the former congressman’s death, suggesting he may’ve been “too mean” to him.
During Tuesday’s episode of “No Spin News,” the veteran broadcaster addressed his 2008 “The O’Reilly Factor” episode featuring Frank, where he ripped into the Massachusetts politician, who was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, over the country’s financial crisis. Some of you may recall that the conversation descended into a shoutfest between O’Reilly and Frank, where the then Fox News host called the congressman a “coward.”
While the face-off went viral and made plenty of headlines at the time, O’Reilly made it clear on Tuesday that he regretted this exchange quite a bit.
“Barney Frank passed away today. Now, I’ve said before that one of the few things that I regret in my 50 years of journalism is that I openly derided Congressman Frank on television,” O’Reilly said. “Barney Frank was a committed liberal. 16 terms in Congress from Massachusetts. That’s 32 years. Not a good guy — I’m not speaking ill of the dead, but you know, gruff. And it was his way or the highway.”
Still, O’Reilly conceded that he didn’t think that Frank was a “malevolent” person, adding, “[He] came on a program to talk about the collapse of the economy when people couldn’t pay their mortgages and, since he was overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I blamed him and he denied it and things got heated and I was too mean to him.”
“I didn’t have to be and I’ve always regretted it,” he continued. “And I think I sent him a note one time saying, ‘Look, I’m sorry about that. I mean, you’re so wrong. You still were misleading the audience, but I overreacted to it.’”
O’Reilly then praised Frank as a longtime “public servant” and “the driver behind gay marriage.”
Watch his full commentary below.
Frank, one of the first openly gay members of Congress and a pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S., died Tuesday night at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. The former congressman had previously entered hospice care while battling congestive heart failure. He was 86.
