Mother Jones, source of fearless journalism, says Bill O’Reilly has his own “Brian Williams problem” — and prints three articles about it. Why the overkill? Maybe because nobody likes sanctimonious, hypocritical, stone-casting liars:
“After NBC News suspended anchor Brian Williams for erroneously claiming that he was nearly shot down in a helicopter while covering the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly went on a tear. … He 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, 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.
“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. … [But] American reporters were not on the ground in this distant war zone. ‘Nobody got to the war zone during the Falklands war,’ Susan Zirinsky, a longtime CBS News producer who helped manage the network’s coverage of the war from Buenos Aires, tells Mother Jones. She does not remember what O’Reilly did during his time in Argentina. But she notes that the military junta kept US reporters from reaching the islands: ‘You weren’t allowed on by the Argentinians. No CBS person got there.’ …”
That’s how Bob Schieffer, who was CBS News’ lead correspondent covering the Falklands war, recalls it: ‘Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands. I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.’ He notes that NBC News reporter Robin Lloyd was the only American network correspondent to reach the islands. ‘I remember because I got my butt scooped on that,’ Schieffer says. ‘He got out there and we were all trying to get there.’ (Lloyd tells Mother Jones that he managed to convince the Argentine military to let him visit Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands, but he spent only a day there—and this was weeks before the British forces arrived and the fighting began.)”
Note, O’Reilly was working for CBS at the time, so when Zirinskyand Schieffer say “nobody” from CBS got to the Falkland Islands, that includes O’Reilly — who was stuck in Argentina with the rest of the CBS news team. Mother Jones also points out that O’Reilly’s reporting of a riot that followed the Argentinian defeat differs in major ways from — and is much more melodramatic — than what other reporters who witnessed the event reported. In short, O’Reilly embellished his experiences. His recounting, in his recent writings, of his days as a young correspondent reporting on El Salvador’s civil war also has grown substantially from his original CBS filed reports.
O’Reilly answered the Mother Jones article on his Fox show by resorting to invective and name-calling. He called writer David Corn “a ‘liar,’ a ‘left-wing assassin,’ and a ‘despicable guttersnipe’ [and] said that I deserve ‘to be in the kill zone.'” Corn responded, “[H]e told Fox News’ media reporter, Howard Kurtz, ‘Nobody was on the Falklands and I never said I was on the island, ever.’ Yet our article included video of O’Reilly saying in 2013, ‘I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands ….'” That makes O’Reilly a double liar, denying his own words.
What O’Reilly and Fox News refused to do was talk to Corn or answer questions. Corn explains, “Mother Jones sent O’Reilly and Fox News a detailed list of questions at 8:30 am on Thursday. We asked for a response by 3:00 pm. 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.”
One of Fox News’ slogans is, “We report, you decide.” But there’s not much to decide here. Mother Jones has O’Reilly and Fox dead to rights. If Fox wants the public to believe it has the same journalistic integrity as NBC News, it has no choice but to suspend O’Reilly for six months, the same punishment Brian Williams got for a far milder prevarication.
Video: Fox News hypocrisy in action