During the August 9 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly claimed: "[W]hat people don't understand is that these Internet bloggers give messages to these candidates: 'If you don't do what we tell you to do, we will trash you and try to interfere with your fundraising.' " Fox News contributor and syndicated columnist Dick Morris later asserted that O'Reilly is “a great rallying point for” liberal bloggers, to which O'Reilly replied: “But I think it's a danger to have blackmailers, which is what these bloggers are, active in the political process.”

As Media Matters for America has documented (here, here, here, here, and here), O'Reilly has repeatedly attacked the progressive Daily Kos blog and compared it to the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan, stating: “There's no difference between the KKK and the Nazis, who have websites, than the Daily Kos.”

From the August 9 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: But here's what I do see as a problem.

MORRIS: Well, they live the [unintelligible]

O'REILLY: Yeah, maybe they do, but it's just a stupid issue. Bloggers threatening -- you know, what people don't understand is that these Internet bloggers give messages to these candidates: “If you don't do what we tell you to do, we will trash you and try to interfere with your fundraising.”

MORRIS: Right.

O'REILLY: And that is unique. I don't think that has ever happened before.

MORRIS: I think that's true. I think there's the mobilization of the left-wing grassroots. And it is increasingly directed against Hillary. Increasingly you're seeing -- and you saw this at the [August 7] AFL[-CIO candidate forum], you saw it at the bloggers' convention, that there is kind of a new left emerging. And for them, Hillary Clinton is not that far from George Bush or Bill O'Reilly in the lexicon of demons.

O'REILLY: Right. She's not radical enough.

MORRIS: Exactly.

O'REILLY: How much power do they really have, though?

MORRIS: A lot, because --

O'REILLY: Do you really think so?

MORRIS: Oh, a lot. Because these folks are a grassroots group that has spread enormously over the Internet. The left is way ahead of the right on the Internet. Democrats are so much better than the Republicans now at penetrating them, and they have literally tens of millions of people who they're in regular touch with. Those are people who are going to swarm all over the primaries.

[...]

MORRIS: Well, if he [former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC)] wins -- if he wins in Iowa, he's in good shape. I don't think he'll win in Iowa, but he's ahead right now because MoveOn and those other groups have so saturated the Democratic left.

O'REILLY: And the people that voted the causes --

MORRIS: And you were a great rallying point for them, my friend.

O'REILLY: Well, they can rally all they want, but they're not going to do anything as far as the main election is concerned. But I think it's a danger to have blackmailers, which is what these bloggers are, active in the political process.