Barry Nolan's O'Reilly attack gets new attention

With the story picked up a week after it broke by the influential Wonkette political media site, it looks as though former tabloid television host Barry Nolan has gone and changed his obit with his campaign to deny former Inside Edition host and current tabloid television superstar Bill O'Reilly a special Emmy in Boston-- the TV market O'Reilly left behind and to which Barry returned after the TMZ-centric tabloid television business swept him aside.

Today, Wonkette posts:

'Mental Case' Bill O'Reilly Urged Not To Attend Boston Emmys

A Boston area cable news host thinks Bill O'Reilly is such a dangerous "mental case" that he should not be the guest of honor at the Boston/New England Emmys. This brave crusader even offers up evidence that O'Reilly's crazy loofah rants are signs of an actual personality disorder or something.

CN8 personality Barry Nolan got ahold of an Indiana University study that offers incontrovertible truth that Bill O'Reilly is a frightful asshole. According to this scientific report, O'Reilly "calls a person or group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds on average," which proves he is a mental case.

For this reason, O'Reilly should be run out of town on the short bus instead of being honored at this swank local television affair. But awards organizers disagree, arguing that O'Reilly's nuttiness and douchebaggery pale in comparison to the wonderful fact that he worked in Boston once.

Wonkette not only failed to recognize Barry as a former tabloid television star (and member of Mensa), but left out the most amusing part of his ill-advised name-calling campaign-- his promise to bring actual mental case (and O'Reilly aura leech) Keith Olbermann to the awards show as his "date."

Meanwhile, the attention-grab has led Barry, who is now a panelist on a radio quiz show and apparently the host of a local cable TV entertainment show (a New England version of Dr. Ruehl?), to be ridiculed as an out-of-touch liberal pinhead and opponent of Free Speech-- an image problem compounded, after our initial report, by his decision to attack our editor, Tabloid Baby author Burt Kearns, as a drama queen and liar-- and accuse him of being sober.

It also triggered an immediate backlash from New Englanders, the media in general, and most embarrassingly, a former chancellor of Boston University, who said O'Reilly was not only deserving of the award but "a remarkably evenhanded journalist... a credit to our school and a worthy mentor to students."

But with the continuing interest in the story, and its slow build across the Internet, there's clear that Barry may one day be remembered less as a former host of Hard Copy than as a footnote in a future edition of an O'Reilly biography