BOB GARFIELD: Here's a shocker: Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel was outraged. An irresponsibly lenient judge had let a child rapist off practically scot-free.

BILL O'REILLY [ON-AIR]: Hi. I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight. Kids are Americans too. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo. I have one simple question because, as you know, I am a simple guy. If a man confessed to raping two American women, adults, do you believe that man would be sentenced to probation anywhere in this country? The answer, of course, is no. That wouldn't happen, because if it did, every women’s group, every media outlet would demand the removal of the judge. Yet in Ohio, a man who confessed to orally raping a five-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old boy over and over was sentenced to probation by Judge John Connor.

BOB GARFIELD: O'Reilly concluded that Connor was unfit for service on the bench. And the next thing you know, both the Governor of Ohio, Republican Robert Taft, and the state's Attorney General were calling for impeachment. Only problem was – and here's another shocker – O'Reilly had the story completely wrong. The defendant never pleaded guilty to rape. And there were further inaccuracies, as Franklin County, Ohio, Common Pleas Judge Connor himself explains.

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: Well, for one thing, they make probation sound like – or he made it sound like – this guy was walking the street. That wasn't true. He was on house arrest. He wasn't permitted to go outside his house, except for either reporting to the probation officer, which he did once a week, or for treatment. You know, he wanted to traumatize his viewers and make it sound as horrible as he could, so they would be outraged. And, obviously, he accomplished his purpose.

BOB GARFIELD: What happened to you in the ensuing days and weeks?

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: First of all, I couldn't talk, you know, because it was still a pending case. But the mischaracterizations or misrepresentations, which basically Mr. O'Reilly started, were starting to be picked up by the local press. So I felt compelled at some point to get on and at least straighten out the public record.

BOB GARFIELD: At one point, you ordered up a transcript of the hearing testimony from psychologists in the case to refresh your memory, a transcript that was available to the press. But did the press in reporting the story, ever actually go to the source?

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: My court reporter said she got many calls for the transcript, and she didn't know who they were, or some of 'em might have been media. She wasn't specific. But she said as soon as she told them the price, they said forget it and nobody ordered. The Columbus Dispatch did order it and did pay for it, and by the way, as soon as they had it, wrote a very good, fair and accurate article about the case.

BOB GARFIELD: So you get out of your car one day and it turns out Fox News has staked out your house. What was that like?

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: They started asking me questions: “Isn't it true you could have sentenced him to 10 years?” And I said, “I'm sorry, I can't talk to you.” “Why won't you talk to us now?” I said, “Well, because you never tell the truth.” And they said, “Well tell me what we didn't tell the truth about. And I said, [CHUCKLES] “About anything.” And then I got in my car and left.

BOB GARFIELD: So let me ask you this. You went through this ordeal -

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: - for exercising your judicial discretion in a case in which you were substantially hamstrung as to what to do, actually. Does this not make you think twice about any kind of decision that would smack of leniency?

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: Not at all. Let me just tell you this: I had 24 sentencings yesterday, and the press was there with the cameras, and I didn't do anything any different than I normally do. And if I were gonna to do something different, I would certainly [LAUGHS] do it with the press there.

BOB GARFIELD: Do you think that your colleagues on the bench in Ohio have nothing further to fear from talk show hosts and politicians eager to make hay out of a kind of populist issue like judicial leniency?

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: Nobody has to fear Mr. O'Reilly. I think his credibility is zip. And in terms of this impeachment, I don't think it'll ever happen again. I think we can get a positive out of this. I think the separation of powers, the legislative, executive and the judicial, is safe now and for some time to come.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Judge Connor, thank you very much.

JUDGE JOHN CONNOR: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: John Connor is a Common Pleas Court Judge in Franklin County, Ohio. Though he believes his media martyrdom freed his colleagues and successors from fear, not everyone agrees. Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyers says cable TV crucifixions cannot but inhibit judges from handing down potentially unpopular decisions.

THOMAS J. MOYERS: I heard – it was second-hand – but I heard from a judge that essentially if you think this threat of impeachment or removal doesn't have an effect on the sentencing that's going to occur tomorrow or the next day, you're wrong. And that's very unfortunate. You know, hopefully that gets washed away eventually, because we avoided a real collision here. But I think there's no question that - if the judge here had been removed from office, there's no question that judges would have feared that in a very tangible way.

BOB GARFIELD: Ohio Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer is a member of Justice at Stake, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group promoting judicial independence. That group's executive director is Bert Brandenburg, who says “that the Republicans' current fixation on the supposedly out-of-control judiciary is just the latest such cycle in the nation's long political history.”

BERT BRANDENBURG:: Well, there's certainly nothing new about criticizing judges and they shouldn't be above criticism. They're public servants and they have to be accountable for their work. And if you look historically through American history, you see cycles in which courts have come under more attack, and we happen to be in one of those cycles right now. However, what's different these days is that there is an outrage industry out there that seeks to, number one, perpetuate this cycle and, number two, really try to redefine what people think about courts by distorting their work. You get the emotional gut-wrenching situation where there's a criminal case, usually, and either someone has committed a horrible crime or they're accused of committing a horrible crime, and the judge didn't, quote, unquote, "make the right decision," and essentially you try to turn the judge into the villain and you try to make them look like they're as out of the mainstream as you can.

BOB GARFIELD: In order for these appeals to the public to work properly and for the outrage to be incited, it seems to me that whoever the broadcaster is has to, you know, leave out all of the nuance and back story and mitigating circumstances that caused the judge to render whatever decision he or she rendered to begin with.

BERT BRANDENBURG:: Unfortunately, the work of the courts is amongst the most vulnerable parts of professional life to distortion through compression in the sense that the more you leave out what led to the decision you don't like, the more you truly distort what happened in the first place. And you don't really expect a cable newscaster to sit there and read a decision out loud of the Supreme Court, and so as a result, you have situation after situation where if somebody doesn't like the decision, you never hear a word about how it got there. There's some good news in the sense that the Internet is available to post decisions for people who have a chance to go to read them. However, since most people get most of their news from cable and local TV, you get this three- to five-second version or maybe a minute or two on just how angry people are about the decision. And then you move on, and all you think is that this judge must be sitting around figuring out how to screw over the American people.

BOB GARFIELD: Your organization is called Justice at Stake. Is it really? I mean, what are the consequences of this kind of outrage-inciting?

BERT BRANDENBURG:: There are three ways in which these attacks, I think, can be particularly harmful to the courts. One is that you're essentially setting up a situation where you're demonizing and undercutting the legitimacy of the courts in the eyes of the public. You're also trying to intimidate judges by calling for their impeachment or, if you can't impeach them, trying to get decisions made that would be different if there wasn't public pressure. And then finally, this does lead to attempts to overturn checks and balances by simply stripping power from the courts. We actually saw an interesting case study last year with the Schiavo case. And that actually had, from this perspective, a reasonably happy ending. I'm not talking about the underlying issue of what to do with Terri Schiavo's situation, but you had this incredible overreaching that the media, which dwelt on the case for three to four weeks – it was kind of wall-to-wall coverage – emboldened interest groups to press Congress and the President to the point where it became the law of the United States. And it was only because of the reaction by the American people saying, “no, don't do this,” that you had this correcting factor. It's not that it was the media's fault, but if it hadn't been for the media's role in the Schiavo case, I'd be very surprised if the Schiavo law would have been signed in the first place.

BOB GARFIELD: There's another cable TV phenomenon I want to ask you about, because it seems similar, if not directly related, to what we've been discussing, and that is this pro-prosecution, demonize-the-defendant cable talk programming that focuses on criminal cases around the country, Nancy Grace and the like. Tell me what this does to the climate for judicial independence.

BERT BRANDENBURG:: Well, cable TV is a very populist medium, and populism is often used to target particular criminal cases so that judges are constantly seen as non-populist. "Unaccountable" is the accusation. And in the populist frame, the idea of balancing independence and accountability doesn't really enter the picture. You're just mad about that latest decision and look how outrageous the conduct of the defendant was. In terms of the impact on the independence of the courts, the great fear is that if you get more and more cable hosts and radio hosts and others competing to be the angriest at the courts in order to get the best ratings, that at some point you either get judges intimidated or you get Congress or state legislatures feeling emboldened that they can actually start stripping powers away from the court. You know, courts should be able to survive some hazing and some inaccurate and unfair commentary. That's fine. But if it gets to a certain level where it's so constant, then there is a risk down the road that it will lead to the weakening of the power of the courts.

BOB GARFIELD: What would you do about this, Counselor? You know, put a muzzle on Bill O'Reilly, or what?

BERT BRANDENBURG:: Well, this is America and nobody needs to be muzzled. However, judges can do more to speak out. They are famously shy to do so. Bar associations and bar leaders who know what's going on and who are often respected; law school deans can speak out. But there's a case to be made here for old-fashioned civic education. If you teach more and more people about how the courts actually work, they are less likely to be susceptible to these types of attacks, especially watering down the ground in advance. Ten to twenty years from now, a generation from now, we're more likely to have a citizenry that's less receptive to these type of demagogic attacks.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Bert, thank you very much.

BERT BRANDENBURG:: Absolutely. Glad to do it.

BOB GARFIELD: Bert Brandenburg is Executive Director of the Justice at Stake Campaign, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington, DC.

BILL O'REILLY: I do know one thing. American kids these days are targets. They have few defenders in the press, no political clout, and a society that is not engaged in protecting them. "Factor" viewers and listeners are the only national group that I know of looking out for the kids. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Mark Phillips and Anni Katz. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl. Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at Onthemedia.org, and e-mail us at Onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from WNYC. Brooke Gladstone, I'm delighted to report, will be back next week. I'm Bob Garfield.