By David K. Shipler
In 2004,
with the publication of my book The
Working Poor: Invisible in America, I was contacted by producers for the O’Reilly Factor about coming on the show
to discuss poverty. First, though, the producers wanted to track down a man who’d
made only a cameo appearance in my book, Kevin Fields. He had been buffeted by both
his own mistakes and a society that lined up against him as he made assiduous
efforts to pull himself into full employment and self-sufficiency. O’Reilly’s
producers wanted to get him on the show with me.
To no good
purpose, I was sure. O’Reilly didn’t admire the poor; he stereotyped them. He
would make mincemeat of Kevin. So while I tried to locate him, I thought I’d
probably warn him what might be coming and perhaps advise him against appearing.
But I couldn’t find him. I’d met him through his girlfriend, who had moved and
disappeared from public records. There was no listing for him.
This I reported to the producers,
but O’Reilly wouldn’t let them give up. So they contacted the penitentiary
where Fields had spent two years for assault (with a baseball bat, he had told me, against five
guys threatening him and his girlfriend) and got an address.
The producers cleverly refrained from telling me that they’d found him, that
they’d then interviewed him by phone, and that—while he wouldn’t be on the show—O'Reilly would present distorted
facts about him to fit Fields into the
conservative image of the immoral, undeserving poor.
I’d mentioned in the book that
Fields, trained in prison as a butcher, hadn’t been able to get a job as one
and had done mostly landscaping. But O’Reilly was determined to portray him as
a lazy, self-indulgent, sex-crazed slacker.
