“A good rule of callout culture is to never target someone for the same things you do. No adulterer is more insufferable, after all, than the fire-and-brimstone minister. But when NBC anchor Brian Williams was exposed for fabricating stories of journalistic heroism, poor Bill O’Reilly just couldn’t help himself. There was Williams, that prick, garnering widespread acclaim for the kind of stories Bill had already been making up for years. …
“Some of the story is probably familiar to you. O’Reilly has lied high and low during his nearly 19 years at Fox News, but the latest round of scrutiny about his stories began with an article in The Nation questioning whether O’Reilly’s reporting aided in covering up a massacre in El Salvador in 1982. Instead of primarily focusing on whether O’Reilly acted as a stooge for murderous conservative policy 14 years before his Fox gig, the media instead latched onto O’Reilly’s claims that he’d reported from a leveled town where no one was left alive or dead, when in fact The Nation‘s article included O’Reilly’s CBS footage of a very much not-leveled town with at least eight people walking around in the background of his shots.
“The hits keep coming. Former colleagues flatly deny O’Reilly’s story that he was attacked by rioters in the 1992 L.A. riots. His story that he witnessed bombings in Northern Ireland was denied by Fox News’ own spokesman. Further, his claim that he was on the doorstep when a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald’s committed suicide was impeached by the fact that O’Reilly was in Dallas at the time, (another) 1,200 miles away from the shooting.
“This constant churning of preposterous shit runs through O’Reilly’s career like discarded picnic food through geese, a steaming heap of compensatory fantasy meeting defensive wish fulfillment. Media Matters could update daily by debunking The O’Reilly Factor alone … (continue reading)