Fox News Bloviator Bill O’Reilly
By Elaine Magliaro
On Thursday, David Corn and Daniel Schulman of Mother Jones posted a story about Fox News media star Bill O’Reilly. In their article, the authors pointed out instances when O’Reilly had apparently falsely made claims about his experiences as a news correspondent reporting from war zones. Paul Fahri of the Washington Post said O’Reilly’s statements echoed “the exaggerations that engulfed now-suspended NBC News anchor BrianWilliams.”
Corn and Schulman noted how O’Reilly “went on a tear” after NBC News suspended Brian Williams “for erroneously claiming that he was nearly shot down in a helicopter while covering the US invasion of Iraq in 2003…” On his show, O’Reilly “declared that the American press isn’t ‘half as responsible as the men who forged the nation.'” Corn and Schulman said that O’Reilly “bemoaned the supposed culture of deception within the liberal media, and he proclaimed that the Williams controversy should prompt questioning of other ‘distortions’ by left-leaning outlets.” Yet, for years, the authors of the article said, “O’Reilly has recounted dramatic stories about his own war reporting that don’t withstand scrutiny—even claiming he acted heroically in a war zone that he apparently never set foot in.”
Corn and Schulman recounted a number of statements that O’Reilly “has made over the years about his reporting from Central and South America during the early 1980s.” They claimed that Fox’s News’s most popular media figure had “described being under fire in ‘war zones’ that were not actually in the middle of armed conflict.”
Corn and Schulman:
O’Reilly has repeatedly told his audience that he was a war correspondent during the Falklands war and that he experienced combat during that 1982 conflict between the United Kingdom* and Argentina. He has often invoked this experience to emphasize that he understands war as only someone who has witnessed it could. As he once put it, “I’ve been there. That’s really what separates me from most of these other bloviators. I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I’ve seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven’t.”
I’m not going to retell Corn’s and Schulman’s lengthy Mother Jones article titled Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem. Here’s a link to it.
In a follow-up article titled These Are the Questions Bill O’Reilly Won’t Answer, David Corn said that Mother Jones had sent both Bill O’Reilly and Fox News “a detailed list of questions at 8:30 am on Thursday.” He noted that Mother Jones asked for a response by 3:00 pm.
David Corn:
We then called Dana Klinghoffer, a spokeswoman for the network, several times to make sure the questions were received and to determine if O’Reilly and Fox would respond. She never took the call or returned the message. Shortly before 3:00 pm, we sent an email containing the questions to Bill Shine, a top exec at Fox News, saying that if O’Reilly and Fox needed more time, we would try to accommodate them. He, too, never responded. At 5:26 p.m., we posted the article.
Immediately afterward, O’Reilly granted interviews to multiple reporters. He resorted to name-calling, saying I was a “liar,” a “left-wing assassin,”and a “despicable guttersnipe.” He said that I deserve “to be in the kill zone.”…It was clear that O’Reilly had no interest in answering the actual questions about his wartime reporting claims.
In the follow-up article, Corn also listed the questions that Mother Jones had sent to Fox that O’Reilly has not answered. Here are the first three questions:
- In numerous instances—on his television and radio shows and in his book, The No Spin Zone—Bill O’Reilly has said that he was in the “war zone” during the Falklands war when he was a correspondent at CBS News. But it appears no American correspondents were allowed in the Falkland Islands war zone during the conflict. How does Mr. O’Reilly explain his comments?
- In a 2004 column, Mr. O’Reilly noted, “Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, I know that life and death decisions are made in a flash.” What combat situation was that?
- In a 2003 book, journalist Tucker Carlson reported on how Mr. O’Reilly answered a question during a Washington panel discussion about media coverage of the Afghanistan war: “Rather than simply answer the question, O’Reilly began by trying to establish his own bona fides as a war correspondent. I’ve covered wars, okay? I’ve been there. The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Middle East. I’ve almost been killed three times, okay.'” Does Mr. O’Reilly have any comment on this? Can he describe his experiences in each of these locations?
In an article for The Daily Beast titled Bill O’Reilly Is No Brian Williams, Lloyd Grove quoted O’Reilly as saying on-air, “Here’s the truth. Everything I’ve said about my reportorial career—everything—is true.” But Grove said that O’Reilly’s assertion was “arguably contradicted by at least one previous media melodrama” involving Al Franken in which Grove had “played a bit part.”
Grove:
In late February 2001, Franken phoned me at The Washington Post, where I was writing the “Reliable Source” column, to point out that O’Reilly had repeatedly claimed that the syndicated tabloid show he hosted in the early 1990s, Inside Edition, had won one and possibly two George Foster Peabody awards—the most prestigious prize in broadcast journalism.
“It seemed strange to me, but he was so adamant,” said Franken, who was at work on his best-selling critique of the conservative media, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them , with O’Reilly’s face prominently featured on the dust jacket. “I thought back and figured maybe ‘Inside Edition’ won a Peabody for its story ‘Swimsuits: How Bare Is Too Bare?’ or maybe for its three-part series on the father of Madonna’s first baby.”
Franken contacted O’Reilly, who eventually acknowledged that, oops, it was a George Polk Award—still an honor, but somewhat less coveted—and O’Reilly had nothing to do with it, since he’d left Inside Edition the year before. Later O’Reilly vehemently insisted that he had never claimed that the show won a Peabody—a flashpoint in an acrimonious debate with Franken at a booksellers convention. Franken enraged O’Reilly by reading aloud from broadcast transcripts in which his opponent made that very claim, over and over. “Shut up!” O’Reilly shouted. Their toxic encounter remains one of YouTube’s greatest hits.
Grove said that O’Reilly was able to emerge from that incident “without a scratch…” Grove noted that “Corn…laments the likelihood of a similar outcome in the current case.”
Corn told The Daily Beast, “Of course there is a difference between Bill O’Reilly and Brian Williams. O’Reilly accurately notes that he is an opinion journalist, and Brian Williams, when he was on the air, was what’s known as an objective reporter who was not supposed to share his views but simply share facts.” Corn added, “But just because you have an opinion about the issues of the day doesn’t absolve you of the sacred obligation of being accurate and truthful. Bill has no out in terms of accuracy and truthfulness, and he doesn’t ask for an out. This, after all, is the ‘No Spin Zone.’”
Do you think Bill O’Reilly has his own Brian Willimas problem? Do you think Fox News should suspend him?
SOURCES
Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem (Mother Jones)
Bill O’Reilly Responds. We Annotate. (Mother Jones)
Bill O’Reilly Is No Brian Williams (The Daily Beast)
Bill O’Reilly exaggerated war-zone experiences, Mother Jones says (Washington Post)
These Are the Questions Bill O’Reilly Won’t Answer (Mother Jones)
Media Reactions to Mother Jones Report on Bill O’Reilly’s “War Zone” Stories (Mother Jones)
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
Suspend O’Reilly? Heck no. Feebleness of thought is FOXNEWS only strength. To whom would their viewership, that teeming mass of imbeciles, turn?
Blouise,
Fox has plenty of other figures to whom the imbeciles can turn for their “fair and balanced” view on current events. The first one who comes to mind is Sean Hannity–Cliven Bundy’s buddy–but there are many more at Fox. Maybe Ann Coulter could fill in for the bloviating blowhard.
maybe Bill’s refer is of better quality now?
http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/09/legal-marijuana-drug-cartels/
Marijuana from Mexico, on the other hand, is often mass-produced in less than ideal conditions, with no guarantee as to the safety of the product.
Homicides in Mexico have dropped from 22,852 in 2011 to 15,649 as of 2014, which tracks relatively closely with the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, although the link between the two events is not conclusive.
good, O’Rielly is a fuggin idiot. He is so full of himself, he reminds me of a not so likeable Ted Baxter. At least Ted knew deep down he sucked, O’Rielly doesn’t have a clue.
Elaine,
But you are ascribing a set of values, ethics, and morals to a viewership who laughs at Rudy Giuliani’s 3/5th jokes about Obama and thinks dinosaur fossils were created in Chinese factories. Suspending O’Reilly would puzzle them greatly and cause an even greater amount of angst within their overly emotional beings. This would lead to a run on guns and teabags and divorce lawyers.
Should he be suspended for hyping his heroism? Sure. Will he be? I give you American Sniper and say, of course not.
Why would this surprise you…. It’s Faux News after all….. A place where Nick gets his sound bites…
Poor Baby,him being picked on,
“Hi, I’m Bill O’Reilly … thanks for watching us tonight … more proof the American media is corrupt.
That is the subject of this evening’s Talking Points memo.
This man … 56-year-old David Corn … who works for the far left magazine … Mother Jones … smeared me, your humble correspondent, yesterday … saying I had fabricated some war reporting.”
http://nation.foxnews.com/2015/02/20/bill-oreillys-talking-points-memo-22015-airing-tonight-8pm-et
BINGO !
“eniobob says:
February 20, 2015 at 8:29 am
Elaine:
“David Corn hits back at Bill O’Reilly”
This could turn out to be very interesting,I think if O’Reilly starts getting more bothered and louder
on this issue,Well as they say “there is some there,there”.
Well, we shall see where this O’Reilly/Corn thing goes ? The man who is left standing shall be the winner. Perhaps it shall be how far one has to fall ?
I wish just once someone could hold one of these guys feet to the fire…. It’s amazing how they can bully and bluster their way thru these things and they allways seem to get away with their BS.
blouise,
“But you are ascribing a set of values, ethics, and morals to a viewership who laughs at Rudy Giuliani’s 3/5th jokes about Obama and thinks dinosaur fossils were created in Chinese factories.”
The viewership is cretinous. Dinosaur fossils should be created in the U.S.A., everyone knows that.
I think the claims are similar but not the situations. Williams held out that he was a straight news person. His utility and meaning was that we could count on him to bring us his best understanding of the truth.
I don’t think O’Reilly is anything of the sort. His program may touch on politics or news but it clearly is his view and his opinion – at best. If he is anything other than one individual expressing his view he is an entertainer.
I think the best or perhaps the worst you can make of this story is that O’Reilly tells a good story.
Besides this kind of stuff about O’Reilly is old news for anyone who heard Al Franking on his old Air America radio program. Al used to tell some pretty devastating stories about O’Reilly – from heroics as a high school athlete to being in combat in… Panama, my recollection.
I say fire Williams and extend O’Reilly’s contract to include a sit-com.
O’Reilly has a self proclaimed “no spin zone” and a segment where he calls others “pinheads or patriots”.
Can’t make your bed and have cake too.
Pete,
Crummy?
with frosting
Pete,
Then sticky too. What a mess in bed!
Bill O’Reilly’s CBS Colleague Says Buenos Aires Was Not A ‘Combat Situation’ After Falklands War
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/21/oreilly-combat-cbs_n_6727988.html
Excerpt:
In addition, Engberg calls into question O’Reilly’s claim that he “was out there pretty much by myself because the other CBS News correspondents were hiding in the hotel.”
“If he said such a thing it is an absolute lie,” Engberg writes. “Everyone was working in the street that night, the crews exhibiting their usual courage. O’Reilly was the one person who behaved unprofessionally and without regard for the safety of the camera crew he was leading.”
Engberg said O’Reilly ignored orders from CBS Bureau Chief Larry Doyle to keep camera lights off in order to avoid attracting attention and being injured: “According to Doyle, O’Reilly returned to the hotel in a rage over the fact that his cameraman wouldn’t turn on the lights to photograph angry crowds. Doyle defended the cameraman and chewed out O’Reilly for violating his instructions on lights.”
Corn said the revelation from the CBS veteran raises further questions about O’Reilly’s integrity.
“This account from a veteran CBS News correspondent and a former colleague of O’Reilly — who witnessed O’Reilly’s short stint in Buenos Aires at the end of the Falklands War — is additional confirmation of what we reported and raises additional questions for O’Reilly,” Corn told The Huffington Post. “Will he responsibly respond to all the questions or will he continue to rely upon invective and bombast?”
UPDATE (8:42 p.m): A Fox spokesperson responded to the allegations via email:
The O’Reilly Factor invited Eric Engberg to appear on the program this Monday and he refused. The Factor has also contacted CBS News and asked them to release the footage in question.
It just keeps growing.Nice to see O’Reilly squirm.It is true what goes around does come around.
Bill O’Reilly Lies–but Some Lies Matter More Than Others
By Jim Naureckas
http://fair.org/blog/2015/02/21/bill-oreilly-lies-but-some-lies-matter-more-than-others/
Excerpt:
It’s obvious that Meanguera is not “leveled to the ground,” nor is anything “smoldering”–rather, there’s a couple of damaged buildings. O’Reilly doesn’t show any “carnage,” but there are plenty of men, women and children going about their business on camera, very much alive. The point of O’Reilly’s CBS report was not how frightening guerrilla violence was, but rather how well the Salvadoran government is doing against the rebels, thanks to US training: “These days, Salvadoran soldiers appear to be doing more singing than fighting,” O’Reilly declares.
The main point of O’Reilly’s Williamsesque reimagining of the Meanguera story may have been to show that he had the “cojones” to go into what he called “Indian Country.” But Grandin points out that the original report had a more sinister context. Meanguera was just a few miles away from El Mozote, a village where the US-created and -trained Atlacatl Brigade killed more than 700 civilians on December 11, 1981–one of the worst atrocities of the entire Cold War. As Grandin notes, “Going to Meanguera in early 1982 would be as if Seymour Hersh, when he first learned of the My Lai massacre, decided to investigate events the next town over.” To do a report on singing soldiers from an army responsible for mass murder has a certain Triumph of the Will quality to it.
Grandin points out that Raymond Bonner, who went to El Mozote for the New York Times and documented the massacre, was subjected to concerted attacks from the Reagan administration, conservative media like the Wall Street Journal and the right-wing pressure group Accuracy In Media. “The Times sided with the critics, and Bonner eventually left the paper, after first being transferred to the business section,” Grandin writes–while O’Reilly, who went to Meanguera to do a feel-good story, “went on to transform cable TV.”
The story of O’Reilly’s war fabrications parallels the selective reporting on Brian Williams’ falsehoods (FAIR Blog, 2/5/15). Corn’s piece–which mention’s Grandin’s, by way of debunking O’Reilly’s pretensions to being a combat journalist–has gotten a fair amount of attention in other media, where it’s largely played as a pissing match between two scrappy journalists. The Nation story, on the other hand, isn’t so much fun to talk about. If O’Reilly lied about being under fire, that reflects on him–and his employers, if they decline to do anything about it. But corporate media as a whole averted their eyes from the El Mozote massacre. Start factchecking those lies, and you’re going to embarrass a whole lot of people–too many, clearly, for comfort.
Did Bill O’Reilly Cover Up a War Crime in El Salvador?
http://m.thenation.com/blog/197401-did-bill-oreilly-cover-war-crime-el-salvador
Excerpt:
But, more importantly, as Bonner and Guillermoprieto (and then, later, Danner and Binford) show, it was not “impossible” to say who was “doing the scorching.” The question is: Did O’Reilly intentionally deflect away from a war crime that implicated Reagan’s Central American policy, or was the deflection a result of his ignorance and laziness?
O’Reilly’s report captures the degeneration of post-Vietnam journalism. Bonner, Guillermoprieto, and Meiselas were operating under the old model, pioneered in Southeast Asia by correspondents like Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett who questioned Washington’s version of events and did all that was necessary to get to the scene and get at the truth. In contrast, O’Reilly, whether he was whisked into Meanguera on a US-supplied helicopter or arrived overland, did, as he writes, a ninety-second “package”—a “stand-up” routine that largely confirmed the official story, as dictated by Enders and Abrams. Bonner was punished for his intrepidness. O’Reilly went on to transform cable TV.
In his memoir, O’Reilly said, of his reporting in El Salvador, that he “banished the fear from my mind.” “I learned a tremendous amount about the conflict and about myself. I could face a high-risk situation. It was a huge confidence builder.”
So far, a lot of “he said, she said” opinions. Seem some one should go on the
record as positive – otherwise it is just ………….
Ex-CBS Reporter Eric Engberg Disputes O’Reilly’s Claims: He’s ‘Not a Real Reporter’
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ex-cbs-reporter-eric-engberg-disputes-oreillys-claims-hes-not-a-real-reporter/
Excerpt:
While Bill O’Reilly phoned into Fox’s MediaBuzz to go off on his former CBS colleague Eric Engberg and Mother Jones editor David Corn, the former appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to reiterate his allegations.
Engberg revealed to CNN host Brian Stelter that he was motivated to come out and criticize O’Reilly because of an unearthed 2009 video in which the Fox host suggested all his CBS colleagues hid in their hotel rooms during the same supposedly protests the now-Fox host claimed to have seem deadly violence.
“What he said was a fabrication, a lie,” Engberg said, before alleging that contrary to O’Reilly’s claims, then-CBS chief Larry Doyle was unhappy with how O’Reilly had acted while covering the riots in Buenos Aires. He also claimed that the photographer who O’Reilly claimed to have dragged out of the protests was actually “upset” the CBS reporter had exposed him to danger.
Engberg also disputed O’Reilly’s claim that Argentinian police were “shooting people down” in the streets. “I didn’t see that happen,” the ex-CBSer told CNN. “I don’t know of any American foreign correspondent who had a weapon pointed at him. I didn’t hear any gunfire. Not only did I not hear any gunfire, as I say, I didn’t hear any sirens.”
He added: “I came to Argentina from years of experience in Washington covering anti-war demonstrations against the Vietnam War. I saw more violence in anti-war demonstrations in D.C. than I saw in Argentina that night.”
CBS staffers dispute Bill O’Reilly’s ‘war zone’ story
http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/22/media/cbs-staffers-oreilly-argentina/index.html
Excerpt:
Bill O’Reilly’s account of a 1982 riot in Argentina is being sharply contradicted by seven other journalists who were his colleagues and were also there at the time.
The people all challenge O’Reilly’s depiction of Buenos Aires as a “war zone” and a “combat situation.” They also doubt his description of a CBS cameraman being injured in the chaos.
“Nobody remembers this happening,” said Manny Alvarez, who was a cameraman for CBS News in Buenos Aires.
Jim Forrest, who was a sound engineer for CBS there, said that when he heard O’Reilly retell the Argentina riot story to interviewer Marvin Kalb several years ago, he contacted Kalb and said “I was on that crew, and I don’t recall his version of events.”…
Eric Engberg, a CBS correspondent who was also in Buenos Aires at the time, defended Corn in a Facebook post on Friday and said, “It was not a war zone or even close. It was an ‘expense account zone.'”
Longtime NBC News correspondent George Lewis, who was also there at the time, agreed with Engberg, writing on Facebook, “Cushiest war I ever covered.”
Did O’Reilly’s photographer get “run down” and bloodied?
CNN has interviewed seven people who were there for CBS, and none of them recall anyone from the network being injured.
“If somebody got hurt, we all would have known,” Alvarez said.
A lot witnesses against Bill,everyone is out to get him I guess.Spin Zone !
buckaroo,
“So far, a lot of “he said, she said” opinions. Seem some one should go on the
record as positive – otherwise it is just ………….”
The floor is open.
Bill O’Reilly Lies About His Role Pushing Debunked “No-Go Zones” Myth
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/01/21/bill-oreilly-lies-about-his-role-pushing-debunk/202207
Excerpt:
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly falsely claimed that he had no role in hyping the myth that Muslim “no-go zones” exist throughout France, just days after Fox News apologized for spreading the fiction. In fact, O’Reilly previously cited the so called “no-go zones” as one of the contributing causes of the Paris terror attacks.
‘Rewriting History’: Famed WWII Historian Bill O’Reilly Smears Yet Another Allied Hero
5/9/09
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/rewriting-history-famed-wwii-histori
Excerpt:
For some time now, Bill O’Reilly has been so desperate to prove that the Bush administration’s use of extreme tactics in the “war on terror” — including torturing detainees and killing civilians — that he’s even been willing to smear the memories of American veterans of World War II to make that point. Last night on his Fox News show, he added Winston Churchill to the list of smear victims.
We all remember the Malmedy smear, for which O’Reilly has never either apologized or corrected the record:
In Malmedy, as you know, U.S. forces captured S.S. forces who had their hands in the air and were unarmed and they shot them dead, you know that. That’s on the record. And documented.”
O’Reilly in fact had it completely reversed: At Malmedy, it was American troops who were massacred by SS guards, not the other way around.
Not only did O’Reilly never correct the insulting gaffe, a year later he repeated it:
In Malmedy, as you know, U.S. forces captured SS forces who had their hands in the air, and they were unarmed, and they shot them down. You know that. That’s on the record, been documented. In Iwo Jima, the same thing occurred. Japanese attempted to surrender, and they were burned in their caves.
Back At Bill O’Reilly On HuffPost Live Over Falklands Controversy: ‘He’s Completely Nutty’
HuffPost Live | By Kira Brekke
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/23/eric-engberg-bill-oreilly-nutty_n_6735912.html
Excerpt:
Former CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg fired back at Bill O’Reilly on Monday, telling HuffPost Live the Fox News host was “dishonest” and “irresponsible” in recounting his story that he reported in a “war zone” during the Falklands War in 1982.
Engberg, who worked alongside O’Reilly in Argentina, called O’Reilly “completely nutty,” and asserted to host Marc Lamont Hill that O’Reilly lied when he told Howard Kurtz on Sunday that he was “out there pretty much by myself, because other CBS News correspondents were hiding in the hotel.”
Engberg was one of these “other CBS News correspondents,” and refuted O’Reilly’s account.
“There were five correspondents working that story for CBS. Four of them had been on that remote site for weeks because the Argentine government would not allow us to go to the Falkland islands,” he said.
Engberg offered an explanation for O’Reilly’s harsh words against his former CBS colleagues, saying that O’Reilly is still “bitter” that CBS News told him weeks after the night in question that O’Reilly “wasn’t going to make it as a correspondent.”
The Proofiness of Bill O’Reilly
Trying to back up his wartime reporting claims, O’Reilly selectively quotes the New York Times—but the Times reporter refutes him.
—By David Corn | Mon Feb. 23, 2015
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/bill-oreilly-proofiness-falklands-new-york-times-meislin
How Bill O’Reilly imploded at CBS following his Falklands War ‘combat’ reporting
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/23/bill-oreillys-implosion-at-cbs-following-his-falklands-war-combat-reporting/
Excerpt:
But Engberg, who spent weeks in Buenos Aires before O’Reilly arrived, remembered something else: O’Reilly’s braggadocio. There was a distinct sense of entitlement emanating from his lunch partner, he said, which struck Engberg as odd. The situation in Buenos Aires was deteriorating, and O’Reilly was young and green.
O’Reilly, however, wasn’t interested in tips. “I tried to give him some advice, give him a read on how the place worked,” Engberg told The Post. “He didn’t seem too interested. I offered him a suggestion on how things worked and he didn’t pay any attention to me. … I saw him as someone who wasn’t willing to be held back by the restrictions that govern rookie reporters — the fact you got to get up in the morning and go over to whatever briefing was going on and report it to your bosses and wait for your next assignment. He was the kind of guy who wanted to find a story that was going to get him on the air that night.”…
***
The controversy also provides a sharper glimpse into a pivotal chapter in the Bill O’Reilly narrative: his brief, dramatic tenure at CBS. It was the moment when O’Reilly’s ambitions collided with his rookie status.
O’Reilly started out small on the local TV circuit: Scranton, Pa., Dallas, Denver, Portland, Ore., and Hartford, Conn. Then CBS came calling. This finally seemed O’Reilly’s big break. He was going to be filing footage for the great Dan Rather.
“But it didn’t work out,” Nicholas Lemann wrote in the New Yorker. “… The CBS episode has stayed with him. It hurt — it still hurts. No matter how big a star he becomes, he’s eternally the guy who was banished from the charmed circle. O’Reilly’s account of what went wrong at CBS has him, as always, pissing off powerful people because he won’t play their phony games.”…
***
Engberg, however, wrote in his post that O’Reilly was overreacting to a routine editing decision. When a superior “informed O’Reilly that [Bob] Schieffer would be doing the report, which would not include any segment from O’Reilly, the reporter exploded. ‘I didn’t come down here to have my footage used by that old man,’ he shouted.” (Schieffer would have been about 45.) O’Reilly was soon sent home, Engberg said, called a “‘disruptive force’ who threatened his bureau’s morale and cohesion.”
The squabble intensified in New York, commented retired CBS national editor Sam Roberts in a Facebook thread beneath Engberg’s Facebook post. Roberts said he was told to turn O’Reilly into a “real CBS News Correspondent,” but Rather had deep reservations.
“Dan Rather walked into my office and shut the door,” Roberts wrote. “He said, ‘Under no circumstances is O’Reilly to be assigned any story for the Evening News. I sat O’Reilly down and said something to the effect that he was like the All-American football player who got drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and brought all of his press clippings to training camp. ‘Nobody gives a s—,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to do it here.’ ”
Bill O’Reilly told different accounts of encounter at gunpoint in Argentina
JON SWAINE, THE GUARDIAN
23 FEB 2015
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/bill-oreilly-told-different-accounts-of-encounter-at-gunpoint-in-argentina/
Excerpt:
Bill O’Reilly has told different versions of an encounter at gunpoint that he claims to have experienced while reporting in Argentina – one involving a single armed soldier and the other detailing several troops.
The Fox News anchor, who has been accused of exaggerating his accounts of wartime coverage, also once said that he was shot at while reporting in the field – a statement he appears not to have repeated in recent years.
Footage emerged on Sunday of the Fox News anchor talking in 2008 about having an M16 rifle pointed at him by a teenage Argentinian soldier, who was 10ft away, while O’Reilly reported on a riot in Buenos Aires at the end of the Falklands war in 1982.
“The guy was about 18, 19 years old,” O’Reilly told interviewer Marvin Kalb in front of an audience. Explaining that he had told the soldier “journalist, don’t shoot” in Spanish, O’Reilly said: “He didn’t shoot me.”
Two years earlier, however, O’Reilly told an interviewer that he had actually faced more than one Argentinian troop who had guns trained on him. O’Reilly estimated that the soldiers had been standing twice as far away as he would state later.
“Argentine soldiers were pointing guns at me … from 20ft away,” he told an online interviewer. Claiming to have “showed no fear”, O’Reilly said: “They didn’t shoot.”
In the 2008 interview, O’Reilly also claimed to have grabbed a colleague and his camera as the cameraman was trampled by protesters. Yet when telling the story on television the following year in another interview, O’Reilly said that a third member of their team had, in fact, tried to save the equipment.
Fudging the numbers?
In a memoir, O’Reilly described the experience in Buenos Aires as “nearly getting my head blown off”. And in an exchange from his syndicated radio show a decade ago, O’Reilly went further. “People were shooting at me,” he said, while recalling “firefights” he encountered in his work in south and central America.
A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to an email seeking comment.
OK, give the guy some credit. O’Reilly is an innovator who has brought the Rashomon approach to news reporting to a state of near perfection. What other journalist has given such respect to the sometimes confusing multiplicity of views common in a war zone.
Besides, he is frequently very funny.
One of the more interesting aspects of O’Reilly’s embellishments concerns the difference in treatment of Williams and O’Reilly. Williams has been banished for at least 6 months and some believe there is little likelihood he will return. O’Reilly, in contrast, seems to be as strong among his audience as ever.
Here is an interesting article in the NYT that explains some of the difference in treatment:
I think there is a lot that the article gets right. It the first place Williams and O’Reilly occupy different positions. We depended on Williams to give us the facts straight. When Williams gives us an opinion we expect it to be based solidly on an accurate understanding of the facts as they are. O’Reilly’s fans appreciate his view, his interpretation of the facts.
The article points out there is a difference in timing. Williams’ transgressions are recent, while O’Reilly’s embellishments are old news.
Williams managed to offend men who have stood the test of combat. Williams made himself seem small trying to share the experience of those who actually faced the danger. In contrast, however ludicrous O’Reilly’s claims about himself, the accusations against him seem to come from the hot house of inside journalism. However accurate the accusations against O’Reilly they still have the flavor of insiders settling old scores.
Here is what I think is the key passage from the article:
““Bill’s credibility with his audience is not based on his record as a traditional journalist,” said Jonathan Klein, a former president of CNN/U.S. “His credibility, in the view of his fans, is based on his trenchant analysis of the events of the day, his pulling no punches, his willingness to call it like it is.”…There are other differences between the two controversies. The incident at the center of Mr. O’Reilly’s occurred more than 30 years ago; Mr. Williams’s happened in 2003. And his accusers are journalists, not military veterans as they were in Mr. Williams’s case. But the most meaningful point of distinction — and the reason Mr. O’Reilly’s job is almost certainly safe — is that he is not an anchorman, with all of the cultural weight that title carries. He’s a professional provocateur.””
My guess is we will eventually see Williams again – but maybe not as an anchor for a major network. O’Reilly seems destined to continue dispensing his special view of the world – unless and until someone turns up a story that matters to his audience and the advertisers they support. So far it does not seem that anyone has come close to that.
Don’t they all now days? With the exception of the exceptional Dan Rathers, being blown away for telling it like it is and embarrassing the Shrub in the process being fired. Well the standards in journalism have gone down tremendous.
Attribution:TheEverlastingGOPStoppers
Don’t publish this. It will probably just enhance his position to his committed audience.
Anybody have any recent numbers on O’Reilly’s viewer share – up, down, stable?
And as I was standing in the desert and I was looking at Jesus and he was 70 feet tall, I looked him in the eyes and he say Oral, I want you to build me a university over there and name it “the Oral Roberts University,” amen, amen, amen, I say unto thee. Yes, lord I will do your bidding for you here on earth….. And I will be happy to manage your earthly treasures that you have entrusted to me….
Chuck,
Thanks for posting that picture! LOL!
BFM,
It all needs to be put into perspective. Fox news..and Billo…have a lot of numbers, but not in the key 25-54 age demographic. Yesterday, Billo was viewed by 557K in the key demographic, with 1,061,000 total. It is safe to assume, from a statistical standpoint, that his show, like most other regularly scheduled shows, has a standing audience, so it is the same sets of eyeballs day after day.
President Obama was soundly criticized, especially by Fox talking heads, for sitting down with some popular YouTubers for an interview last week. The interviewers were: Hank Green of the Vlog Brothers, GloZell Green, and Bethany Mota.
The Vlog Brothers have a subscriber base of 2,487,744. GloZell has 3,426,633 subscribers.
Teenage vlogger Bethany Mota has a whopping 8,322,875 subscribers to her YouTube channel. Each of her videos gets anywhere from three to six million views. The one she put up for Valentine’s Day already has 2.2 million hits. That means a 19-year-old outdraws Billo by a factor of at least 4:1
The Presidential interviews by the YouTube vloggers got a LOT of hits. It has been reproduced by a number of YouTube users, and by my count has been seen by over five million users. This is the original released by the White House on Sunday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR6iQ62v9k
What does it all mean? Cable TV is increasingly irrelevant in the Internet age. Especially with an increasing number of people cutting the cable habit.
Thanks for the very interesting numbers. I had no idea YouTube and, presumably, other video channels have such big numbers. Must be driving conventional network managers crazy.
Shorter Bill O’Reilly: I saw nuns get killed on TV — and that put me in a war zone!
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/shorter-bill-oreilly-i-saw-nuns-get-killed-on-tv-and-that-put-me-in-a-war-zone/
Excerpt:
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s reporting is being questioned again, this time regarding his apparent claim that he witnessed American nuns being shot in the head in El Salvador.
According to Media Matters, O’Reilly contradicted his own reporting making that statement on the Dec. 14, 2012 episode of The O’Reilly Factor.
“My mother, for example, doesn’t understand evil. I would tell her, ‘Hey mom, I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head,’” O’Reilly told guests Brian Russell and Karen Ruskin in a discussion following the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting attack. He made a similar remark on his radio show seven years earlier, saying, “I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador.”
But O’Reilly had also stated on multiple occasions that he was not assigned to work in El Salvador for CBS News until after the nuns were raped, shot and killed by members of the country’s national guard in December 1980.
Two new former colleagues also dispute Bill O’Reilly’s JFK story
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/two-new-former-colleagues-also-dispute-bill-oreillys-jfk-story/
Gene,
I ;love V for Vendetta! Great movie and great reference.
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