It’s official: When Unsexy all-star Bill O’Reilly writes about porn, the Internet goes apeshit

When we first offered up our recent Bill O'Reilly discovery to the hounds of the Internet, we knew that would prick up more than a few interested ears. It would have been remarkable enough that the same falafel-loving Fox news blowhard who's earned his spot in our Unsexiest hall of fame (#58 and 2006, and #16 in 2007) wrote for the Phoenix way back in the ‘70s. But the fact that young O'Reilly's beat involved a whole lotta porn -- well, that just took things to a whole new level.

Indeed, the sheer glorious absurdity of our unearthings -- namely, his profile of Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano -- was not lost on the rest of the wired world:

Journalism news overlord Romenesko posted it on his widely read industry blog at Poynter Online. As did web-based watchdog group Media Matters for America. Gawker astutely zoomed in on how O'Reilly references a previous article in which he actually interviewed Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace -- now, if only we could dig that one up. The Atlantic's pithy post on The Daily Dish dubbed our find "The Salad Days of a Culture Warrior." Our coverage even made the Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet.

Meanwhile, Mediabistro's TVNeswer blog picked up the story, surprised to find larval O'Reilly's prose "a pretty good read." DC news outlet The Raw Story reveled in how the Damiano piece "foreshadowed" the pundit's fixation with all things sexually explicit.

And of course there was the inevitable posting on the cool-stuff aggregation community Reddit, who filed it, as we did, under "WTF." (Writes one commenter: "i had to read the title like 3 times because it was just breaking my brain.") Meanwhile, BoingBoing had its own little gleeful spasm about this particular deep cut from our favorite "frothymouthed hatebaiter."

But we're still holding out for the holy grail: a nod from O'Reilly himself. So if any of you readers keep it locked to Fox News, do let us know if we get any on-air shout-outs. Lord knows we're not going to sit through an episode of the Factor if we don't need to. Oh wait, there's already a website for that: And they plugged our story, too!