As Grammy Award-winning recording artist Beyonce performs in and tours Dublin with her family, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is telling us how he really feels about the 32-year old singer.
On Monday nights show, O’Reilly spoke to hip hop icon Russell Simmons about the “harmful entertainment marketed to largely unsupervised children.” O’Reilly was especially outspoken about Beyonce, pointing to her steamy “Partition” video which shows her having sex with her husband in the back of a limousine.
“Teenage girls look up to Beyoncé … why on earth would this woman do that? When she knows [about] the devastation [of] unwanted pregnancies and fractured families,” O’Reilly said. “I believe an entertainer like Beyoncé [has] an obligation to protect children.”
Pointing out that, as a mother and promoter of gender equality, Beyonce has an “obligation to protect children” and he strongly believes that she is far from doing so with her recent video, which he calls “inexplicable” and “exploitive garbage.”
58-year old Simmons, who is said to be the third richest figure in hip hop, defended Beyonce saying that she is simply reflecting our society’s reality by expressing “something that’s sexual in music.”
“There’s research that says that a man thinks about sex every 12 seconds …If we want that reality changed, then we have to do things that affect the core,” Simmons explained.
“Bill, if you think that art that comes out of a community is the cause of the struggle–”
“That’s art?” O’Reilly interrupted.
“Yes, absolutely,” Simmons said.
“Beyonce in the back of a limo having sex and referencing Monica Lewinsky is art?”
“She’s a brilliant artist,” Simmons said. “And she’s not only appreciated by people of color, as you know, she’s really one of the top artists in the world to people of every color.”
But O’Reilly stuck to his guns, pointing out that “teenage girls look up to Beyoncé, particularly girls of color. She’s an idol to them.”
Though Simmons was on the show to promote his new book on meditation, O’Reilly spoke mostly of curing the “fundamental disease” of influencing our youth in a negative way.
“You’re going to have to get people like Jay-Z, Kanye West – all these gangsta rappers – to knock it off,” he told Simmons at the conclusion of the show.
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