When a reporter says he "saw" something, the natural inclination is to think they witnessed it, not that they saw pictures of it. Bull O is being very Clintonesque, i.e deceptive.
It's not quite as bad as saying he covered the War "In The Falklands", or the other shit he's been caught flat out lying about, but it's deceptive, and he'd never let a Liberal get away with such nonsense.
And The Beat goes on with Bull O. Of course, when all you have to do is blame "the left", and the sucker sheep eat it up, and don't care about Truth, no worries at all for Bull:
Bill O'Reilly's LA riots 'bombardment' stories disputed by former colleagues
Fox News host, whose stories of past reporting exploits are under renewed scrutiny, claimed ‘we were attacked by protesters’ when covering the 1992 riots
A Fox News spokesperson said that claims casting doubt on O’Reilly’s statements were ‘nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates’. Photograph: Dennis Kleiman/Corbis Jon Swaine in New York
@jonswaine
Thursday 26 February 2015 17.33 EST Last modified on Thursday 26 February 2015 18.55 EST
Former colleagues of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host whose tales of past reporting exploits are facing renewed scrutiny, have disputed his account of surviving a bombardment of bricks and rocks while covering the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.
Six people who covered the riots with O’Reilly in California for Inside Edition told the Guardian they did not recall an incident in which, as O’Reilly has claimed, “concrete was raining down on us” and “we were attacked by protesters”.
Several members of the team suggested that O’Reilly may instead be overstating a fracas involving one disgruntled Los Angeles resident, who smashed one of their cameras with a piece of rubble.
Two of the team said the man was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighbourhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”
O’Reilly, 65, is one of the most influential figures in American broadcasting and publishing. He is paid a reported $20m a year to host his show, the O’Reilly Factor, which consistently ranks among the most-watched current affairs programs in US cable TV. He has also authored several bestselling books and memoirs.
Bill O'Reilly twisted truth on 'war zone' account, says former CBS colleague
He has for several days been defending himself against accusations that he inflated his recollections of reporting from Argentina at the end of the Falklands war as a young correspondent for CBS News. The Guardian found he had told differing versions of an apparent encounter at gunpoint with Argentinian forces.
He has also been accused of lying in one of his books about being present at the scene when a CIA source, who had allegedly been linked to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, killed himself in 1977.
A spokeswoman for Fox News declined to respond to detailed questions about O’Reilly’s recollections of the Los Angeles riots. She said in a statement that claims casting doubt on his statements were “nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates”.
“Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims levelled against him,” the spokeswoman said. “Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. Fox News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.”
O’Reilly has on several occasions referred to a perilous situation he said that he endured while covering the riots in Los Angeles for Inside Edition, the syndicated news magazine show that he fronted between 1989 and 1995.
“They were throwing bricks and stones at us,” O’Reilly told an online interviewer in 2006. “Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time.” Earlier this week, he told the broadcaster Hugh Hewitt: “We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us.”
Bill O’Reilly reports from Los Angeles for Inside Edition in 1992. Photograph: Youtube Inside Edition colleagues from the time who were in Los Angeles with O’Reilly – reporters Bonnie Strauss, Tony Cox and Rick Kirkham, and crew members Theresa McKeown, Bob McCall and Neil Antin – told the Guardian that they did not recall such an incident.
Kirkham, the show’s lead reporter on the riots, was adamant that it did not take place. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”
Tonya Freeman, the head of the show’s library at the time, said: “I honestly don’t recall watching or hearing about that. I believe I probably would have remembered something like that.” Another librarian from the time also said she did not recall the incident. A spokeswoman for Inside Edition declined to comment. Several other senior Inside Edition staffers from the time declined to comment when asked if they recalled O’Reilly’s version of events.
Several members of the team, however, recalled that one afternoon in the days following the peak of the riots, which began on 29 April, the angry resident attacked a camera while O’Reilly was being filmed near the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Pico Boulevard. “It was one person with one rock,” said McCall, the sound man. “Nobody was hit.”
“A man came out of his home,” said Antin, who was operating the camera that was struck. “He picked up a chunk of concrete, and threw it at the camera.” Told of O’Reilly’s description of a bombardment, Antin said: “I don’t think that’s really … No, I mean no, not where we were.”
“There was no concrete,” said McKeown. “There was a single brick”. Kirkham’s response was: “Oh my God. That is a completely fictitious story. Nothing ever rained down on us”. Kirkham, whose van was shown on an episode of the show being shot at during late-night rioting, later made a film for HBO about his struggle with drug addiction.
McKeown, the director of west coast operations, and Kirkham, said O’Reilly had in the moments beforehand irritated residents who were trying to put out fires and clear wreckage. A seventh member of the team, who declined to be quoted for this article, agreed with this characterisation of the incident.
“There were people putting out fires nearby,” said McKeown. “And Bill showed up in his fancy car.” McKeown said at one point, the driver of O’Reilly’s personal car risked causing further offence by exiting the vehicle with a bottle of Windex and polishing the roof.
“The guy was watching us and getting more and more angry,” said McKeown. “Bill was being Bill – complaining ‘people are in my eye line’ – and kind of being very insensitive to the situation.” Kirkham said: “It was just so out of line. He starts barking commands about ‘this isn’t good enough for me’, ‘this isn’t gonna work’, ‘who’s in charge here?’”
The man shouted abuse at O’Reilly and the team, crew members said, and O’Reilly ordered him to shut up. He asked “don’t you know who I am?’,” according to two members of the team.
“The guy lost it,” said McKeown. Enraged, he is said to have leapt on to the team’s flatbed trailer and kicked over a light, before throwing the piece of rubble, which smashed the camera and an autocue screen. Antin said he restrained the man. But O’Reilly then continued taunting him while a producer stood between them. “Come on, you wanna take me? I’ll take you on,” O’Reilly is said to have shouted at him.
McCall said the producer, who is about a foot shorter than O’Reilly, “didn’t have much trouble holding Bill back.” McCall said: “It was a lot more show than anything else on Bill’s part.”
A passing police car was flagged down. After an officer called for backup, several more officers eventually arrived. Crew members recalled that before this, O’Reilly had been hauled inside one of the team’s vehicles by a colleague. “It wasn’t a police rescue,” said Kirkham.
The crew told the police they did not want to press charges and the man was escorted home. Irritated police officers instructed the crew they needed to leave the area. “We had to lay all of our equipment down and just drive out of there with cables dragging,” said Antin. McKeown said that by then, an intimidating crowd had gathered. Other members of the team said the man remained alone.
Antin said an ashen-faced and “visibly shaken” O’Reilly rushed down a nearby alleyway with a secondary cameraman to film replacement shots, which were to be broadcast later as if live.
Asked if O’Reilly’s behaviour was to blame for the incident, McKeown said: “I mean, it would have pissed me off. There didn’t seem to be a sensitivity for what these people were going through. It was more ‘I’m here to do my show’.” Kirkham said O’Reilly had provoked the man, who was “pissed off with O’Reilly’s attitude”.
Antin, however, rejected suggestions that O’Reilly was responsible. “Not at all,” he said. McCall said he did not know. “I can’t say if that’s true or not,” he said. “But I don’t have much respect for Bill, having worked for him during that time. He was a real jackass.”
Asked to respond to the claims from O’Reilly’s former colleagues, and to explain whether O’Reilly had been describing a separate incident when he said “concrete was raining down on us”, the Fox News spokeswoman resent her original emailed statement.
Bill O'Reilly's LA riots 'bombardment' stories disputed by former colleagues
Fox News host, whose stories of past reporting exploits are under renewed scrutiny, claimed ‘we were attacked by protesters’ when covering the 1992 riots
A Fox News spokesperson said that claims casting doubt on O’Reilly’s statements were ‘nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates’. Photograph: Dennis Kleiman/Corbis Jon Swaine in New York
@jonswaine
Thursday 26 February 2015 17.33 EST Last modified on Thursday 26 February 2015 18.55 EST
Former colleagues of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host whose tales of past reporting exploits are facing renewed scrutiny, have disputed his account of surviving a bombardment of bricks and rocks while covering the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.
Six people who covered the riots with O’Reilly in California for Inside Edition told the Guardian they did not recall an incident in which, as O’Reilly has claimed, “concrete was raining down on us” and “we were attacked by protesters”.
Several members of the team suggested that O’Reilly may instead be overstating a fracas involving one disgruntled Los Angeles resident, who smashed one of their cameras with a piece of rubble.
Two of the team said the man was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighbourhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”
O’Reilly, 65, is one of the most influential figures in American broadcasting and publishing. He is paid a reported $20m a year to host his show, the O’Reilly Factor, which consistently ranks among the most-watched current affairs programs in US cable TV. He has also authored several bestselling books and memoirs.
Bill O'Reilly twisted truth on 'war zone' account, says former CBS colleague
He has for several days been defending himself against accusations that he inflated his recollections of reporting from Argentina at the end of the Falklands war as a young correspondent for CBS News. The Guardian found he had told differing versions of an apparent encounter at gunpoint with Argentinian forces.
He has also been accused of lying in one of his books about being present at the scene when a CIA source, who had allegedly been linked to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, killed himself in 1977.
A spokeswoman for Fox News declined to respond to detailed questions about O’Reilly’s recollections of the Los Angeles riots. She said in a statement that claims casting doubt on his statements were “nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates”.
“Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims levelled against him,” the spokeswoman said. “Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. Fox News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.”
O’Reilly has on several occasions referred to a perilous situation he said that he endured while covering the riots in Los Angeles for Inside Edition, the syndicated news magazine show that he fronted between 1989 and 1995.
“They were throwing bricks and stones at us,” O’Reilly told an online interviewer in 2006. “Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time.” Earlier this week, he told the broadcaster Hugh Hewitt: “We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us.”
Bill O’Reilly reports from Los Angeles for Inside Edition in 1992. Photograph: Youtube Inside Edition colleagues from the time who were in Los Angeles with O’Reilly – reporters Bonnie Strauss, Tony Cox and Rick Kirkham, and crew members Theresa McKeown, Bob McCall and Neil Antin – told the Guardian that they did not recall such an incident.
Kirkham, the show’s lead reporter on the riots, was adamant that it did not take place. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”
Tonya Freeman, the head of the show’s library at the time, said: “I honestly don’t recall watching or hearing about that. I believe I probably would have remembered something like that.” Another librarian from the time also said she did not recall the incident. A spokeswoman for Inside Edition declined to comment. Several other senior Inside Edition staffers from the time declined to comment when asked if they recalled O’Reilly’s version of events.
Several members of the team, however, recalled that one afternoon in the days following the peak of the riots, which began on 29 April, the angry resident attacked a camera while O’Reilly was being filmed near the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Pico Boulevard. “It was one person with one rock,” said McCall, the sound man. “Nobody was hit.”
“A man came out of his home,” said Antin, who was operating the camera that was struck. “He picked up a chunk of concrete, and threw it at the camera.” Told of O’Reilly’s description of a bombardment, Antin said: “I don’t think that’s really … No, I mean no, not where we were.”
“There was no concrete,” said McKeown. “There was a single brick”. Kirkham’s response was: “Oh my God. That is a completely fictitious story. Nothing ever rained down on us”. Kirkham, whose van was shown on an episode of the show being shot at during late-night rioting, later made a film for HBO about his struggle with drug addiction.
McKeown, the director of west coast operations, and Kirkham, said O’Reilly had in the moments beforehand irritated residents who were trying to put out fires and clear wreckage. A seventh member of the team, who declined to be quoted for this article, agreed with this characterisation of the incident.
“There were people putting out fires nearby,” said McKeown. “And Bill showed up in his fancy car.” McKeown said at one point, the driver of O’Reilly’s personal car risked causing further offence by exiting the vehicle with a bottle of Windex and polishing the roof.
“The guy was watching us and getting more and more angry,” said McKeown. “Bill was being Bill – complaining ‘people are in my eye line’ – and kind of being very insensitive to the situation.” Kirkham said: “It was just so out of line. He starts barking commands about ‘this isn’t good enough for me’, ‘this isn’t gonna work’, ‘who’s in charge here?’”
The man shouted abuse at O’Reilly and the team, crew members said, and O’Reilly ordered him to shut up. He asked “don’t you know who I am?’,” according to two members of the team.
“The guy lost it,” said McKeown. Enraged, he is said to have leapt on to the team’s flatbed trailer and kicked over a light, before throwing the piece of rubble, which smashed the camera and an autocue screen. Antin said he restrained the man. But O’Reilly then continued taunting him while a producer stood between them. “Come on, you wanna take me? I’ll take you on,” O’Reilly is said to have shouted at him.
McCall said the producer, who is about a foot shorter than O’Reilly, “didn’t have much trouble holding Bill back.” McCall said: “It was a lot more show than anything else on Bill’s part.”
A passing police car was flagged down. After an officer called for backup, several more officers eventually arrived. Crew members recalled that before this, O’Reilly had been hauled inside one of the team’s vehicles by a colleague. “It wasn’t a police rescue,” said Kirkham.
The crew told the police they did not want to press charges and the man was escorted home. Irritated police officers instructed the crew they needed to leave the area. “We had to lay all of our equipment down and just drive out of there with cables dragging,” said Antin. McKeown said that by then, an intimidating crowd had gathered. Other members of the team said the man remained alone.
Antin said an ashen-faced and “visibly shaken” O’Reilly rushed down a nearby alleyway with a secondary cameraman to film replacement shots, which were to be broadcast later as if live.
Asked if O’Reilly’s behaviour was to blame for the incident, McKeown said: “I mean, it would have pissed me off. There didn’t seem to be a sensitivity for what these people were going through. It was more ‘I’m here to do my show’.” Kirkham said O’Reilly had provoked the man, who was “pissed off with O’Reilly’s attitude”.
Antin, however, rejected suggestions that O’Reilly was responsible. “Not at all,” he said. McCall said he did not know. “I can’t say if that’s true or not,” he said. “But I don’t have much respect for Bill, having worked for him during that time. He was a real jackass.”
Asked to respond to the claims from O’Reilly’s former colleagues, and to explain whether O’Reilly had been describing a separate incident when he said “concrete was raining down on us”, the Fox News spokeswoman resent her original emailed statement.
[h=1]For Bill O'Reilly, the facts are a factor: Our view[/h] The Editorial Board, 9:47 p.m. EST February 26, 2015
[h=2]Perceived vast liberal conspiracy that helped create 'Fox News' means not having to say you're sorry.[/h]
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly pitches himself to viewers as a brave truth-teller, outraged by the partisan spin that has taken over the national debate. Judging by his ratings, that message sells. On Monday, OReilly's show had more viewers between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. than all of CNN's shows between 6 p.m. and midnight — combined.
But now O'Reilly stands exposed of the same kind of puffed-up truth-bending he so regularly derides on his show. O'Reilly said he was in "active war zones" in the Falklands in 1982. He wasn't. He said he survived a "combat situation in Argentina." He didn't. He said he "saw nuns get shot in the back of the head." Nope. Not even in the same country.
True, O'Reilly is more opinionator than journalist. And the Falklands War happened a long time ago. But the facts still matter, and they are just as good a yardstick for O'Reilly as they are for recently suspended NBC News anchor Brian Williams.
By journalism ethics, Fox should distance itself from its truth-challenged employee. But that's not likely to happen because for Fox and its fans, credibility is established by different means. Having common enemies matters more than factual detail. That's why Fox has left a canyon-wide gap between its standards and those of NBC.
NBC took its tarnished anchor off the air; Fox let O'Reilly use his show to go on the attack. NBC executives began an investigation of Williams; Fox News CEO Roger Ailes publicly backed his marquee talent. Williams apologized; O'Reilly threatened journalists writing about him.
NBC tried to make itself better. Fox went to war.
That shouldn't be a surprise. Fox News was not created to be neutral but rather to feed a hunger among conservatives for a network they could relate to. For decades, the so-called mainstream news media left them with the impression that the press, liberals and the Democratic Party shared the same enemies: them. According to a Gallup Poll last fall, even one in five Democrats think the news media are too liberal.
That was never the networks' goal. Their news divisions are built on a commitment to impartiality. But good intentions don't guarantee success, and Fox has turned perception of liberal bias into a profitable reality. As a business matter, Fox doesn't need to compete on credibility. Many of its viewers long ago decided the rest of the news media have none.
That's why, absent any earth-shattering revelations, O'Reilly isn't going anywhere. Every time media critics hit Fox and O'Reilly, it just feeds the feeling that the left is out to get them, which in turn feeds Fox's success.
It's unfortunate that neither the network nor its star sees a need for allegiance to the truth. But for O'Reilly and Fox, the perceived vast liberal conspiracy that helped create the network two decades ago means not having to say you're sorry today.
[h=2]Perceived vast liberal conspiracy that helped create 'Fox News' means not having to say you're sorry.[/h]
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly pitches himself to viewers as a brave truth-teller, outraged by the partisan spin that has taken over the national debate. Judging by his ratings, that message sells. On Monday, OReilly's show had more viewers between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. than all of CNN's shows between 6 p.m. and midnight — combined.
But now O'Reilly stands exposed of the same kind of puffed-up truth-bending he so regularly derides on his show. O'Reilly said he was in "active war zones" in the Falklands in 1982. He wasn't. He said he survived a "combat situation in Argentina." He didn't. He said he "saw nuns get shot in the back of the head." Nope. Not even in the same country.
True, O'Reilly is more opinionator than journalist. And the Falklands War happened a long time ago. But the facts still matter, and they are just as good a yardstick for O'Reilly as they are for recently suspended NBC News anchor Brian Williams.
By journalism ethics, Fox should distance itself from its truth-challenged employee. But that's not likely to happen because for Fox and its fans, credibility is established by different means. Having common enemies matters more than factual detail. That's why Fox has left a canyon-wide gap between its standards and those of NBC.
NBC took its tarnished anchor off the air; Fox let O'Reilly use his show to go on the attack. NBC executives began an investigation of Williams; Fox News CEO Roger Ailes publicly backed his marquee talent. Williams apologized; O'Reilly threatened journalists writing about him.
NBC tried to make itself better. Fox went to war.
That shouldn't be a surprise. Fox News was not created to be neutral but rather to feed a hunger among conservatives for a network they could relate to. For decades, the so-called mainstream news media left them with the impression that the press, liberals and the Democratic Party shared the same enemies: them. According to a Gallup Poll last fall, even one in five Democrats think the news media are too liberal.
That was never the networks' goal. Their news divisions are built on a commitment to impartiality. But good intentions don't guarantee success, and Fox has turned perception of liberal bias into a profitable reality. As a business matter, Fox doesn't need to compete on credibility. Many of its viewers long ago decided the rest of the news media have none.
That's why, absent any earth-shattering revelations, O'Reilly isn't going anywhere. Every time media critics hit Fox and O'Reilly, it just feeds the feeling that the left is out to get them, which in turn feeds Fox's success.
It's unfortunate that neither the network nor its star sees a need for allegiance to the truth. But for O'Reilly and Fox, the perceived vast liberal conspiracy that helped create the network two decades ago means not having to say you're sorry today.
I know no one cares. That's kinda the point. If you're on one side of the aisle, you can do, say, and get away with pretty much anything. No one cares. All you have to do is blame the left and the blind sheet eat it up, nod approvingly, and continue bleating.
If you're on the other, every word is examined, parsed, disputed. Terrible double standard.
I care, so when I see truth treated like a foreign object, I'll post about it.
I agree. I dont even understand the motivation here. I guess it's supposed to be a retaliation for the Bryan Williams situation , but it's really apples/oranges trying to compare an anchor of a network news broadcast to a show host on a cable news network.
I'm sure every show host on fox , msnbc , and cnn have embellished , exaggerated , or told little white lies , but i dont see how that is relevent to an anchor on abc , cbs , or nbc.
You just cant compare a network anchor to a cable news show host.
of course it is. That is exactly what it is. Its a desperate attempt to discredit the #1 guy on the #1 network which liberals hate. Facts don't matter here. Everything and anything will be tried and said to try and make this a story. Every fact presented against this witch hunt will be ignored. Its kinda silly.
Hell , O'Reilly lies every day when he says "you're entering a no spin zone" ... he has as much spin as anyone.
...but why does it matter ? Nobody is asking for honesty or integrity out of a host of a cable news show. ...but they do ask for integrity out of a broadcast news anchor.
Trying to compare O'Reilly , hannity , maddow , hayes , or wolf blitzer to a network anchor is stupid.
...but why does it matter ? Nobody is asking for honesty or integrity out of a host of a cable news show. ...but they do ask for integrity out of a broadcast news anchor.
Trying to compare O'Reilly , hannity , maddow , hayes , or wolf blitzer to a network anchor is stupid.
[h=1]Bill O’Reilly: The make-believe war correspondent[/h] Tina Dupuy 3:46 p.m. EST February 27, 2015
A report that Fox News juggernaut Bill O’Reilly has been fluffing his war zone encounters was met with a collective chortle. Mainly because as a media-consuming public, we are not surprised to hear O’Reilly makes stuff up. The sun will rise in the east and Bill O’Reilly will call some undeserving person a “thug” – or in the case of murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, a baby killer – and moments later, vehemently deny ever saying it.
We’ve all been groomed to accept Bill’s baloney pinned to a brag about his stratospheric ratings. He’s just quaint Americana – a weird yet popular quirk of his graying generation.
“I am not easily shocked,” O’Reilly said in 2009. “I’ve reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands.”
Only he didn’t. He never made it to the Falklands, according Bob Schieffer and several others from CBS who were with O’Reilly in mainland Argentina. He actually was in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles from the Falklands, covering a protest. Over the years, he’s spun it into a very dangerous scenario: people were killed, live rounds were shot, an M-16 aimed was at his head. There were no actual reports of fatalities in the protest – only in O’Reilly’s account of his own heroism.
Also, he’s said on several occasions he saw nuns get shot in the head in El Salvador. It’s well documented he wasn’t in the country when that took place.
“I’ve been there,” he said on Hamptons TV in 2009. “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.”
Uh huh.
So we all shrugged and chuckled, America’s favorite bellicose uncle just got caught telling a tall tale about scary places where no one even speaks English!
There’s a consensus that O’Reilly will not see the same fate as NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams for a similar crime of embellishing his “war” stories. While Williams was taken off air for six months without pay by NBC, O’Reilly has the “full support” of the president of Fox News of Roger Ailes. Different standards, you see. Williams, it’s been explained, is a trusted journalist; O’Reilly is a popular entertainer.
What O’Reilly is, is a fraud.
I say this in the wake of the ISIS beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Also for the other nearly 70 journalists who have died covering the Syrian conflict since 2011. And the 61 journalists killed worldwide in 2014 (nearly 70 percent of which, according to Committee to Protect Journalists, were covering politics). And the countless others intimidated or jailed for doing their jobs.
You’d think since Bill likes to make believe he was in combat, he’d have a kinship – a kindness for reporters in general and for war correspondents specifically. Since they’re doing what he dreamed he did on the front lines, you’d think he’d be the biggest, loudest advocate for news gatherers and the dangers (he imagines) they face.
Five journalists died in Iraq last year covering a war O’Reilly championed from his national platform. How many times has he covered their sacrifice? Zero.
Not only is he unsympathetic to the people who do what he wants his viewers to think he did – he threatened a reporter assigned to the story about his fabrications! “During a phone conversation, he told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter’s coverage was inappropriate. ‘I am coming after you with everything I have,’ Mr. O’Reilly said. ‘You can take it as a threat,’” reported the newspaper.
O’Reilly’s whole schtick has been to insult journalists and spread distrust of the media because, according to Bill, they don’t tell the truth. Hypocrisy is one way to spin it. I call it fraud.
War correspondents risk their lives every day to document conflicts, to give us the first draft of history, to keep us informed. Mostly they’re brave, unsung servants of the public interest. Hundreds of them die in this pursuit. No wonder Bill O’Reilly wants to pretend he’s one of them.
The irony, of course, is if Bill were a journalist – if we held him to any known journalistic standards – he’d be out of a job. Being a fake journalist pretending to have been in combat zones has much better job security.
That’s the truth.
A report that Fox News juggernaut Bill O’Reilly has been fluffing his war zone encounters was met with a collective chortle. Mainly because as a media-consuming public, we are not surprised to hear O’Reilly makes stuff up. The sun will rise in the east and Bill O’Reilly will call some undeserving person a “thug” – or in the case of murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, a baby killer – and moments later, vehemently deny ever saying it.
We’ve all been groomed to accept Bill’s baloney pinned to a brag about his stratospheric ratings. He’s just quaint Americana – a weird yet popular quirk of his graying generation.
“I am not easily shocked,” O’Reilly said in 2009. “I’ve reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands.”
Only he didn’t. He never made it to the Falklands, according Bob Schieffer and several others from CBS who were with O’Reilly in mainland Argentina. He actually was in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles from the Falklands, covering a protest. Over the years, he’s spun it into a very dangerous scenario: people were killed, live rounds were shot, an M-16 aimed was at his head. There were no actual reports of fatalities in the protest – only in O’Reilly’s account of his own heroism.
Also, he’s said on several occasions he saw nuns get shot in the head in El Salvador. It’s well documented he wasn’t in the country when that took place.
“I’ve been there,” he said on Hamptons TV in 2009. “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.”
Uh huh.
So we all shrugged and chuckled, America’s favorite bellicose uncle just got caught telling a tall tale about scary places where no one even speaks English!
There’s a consensus that O’Reilly will not see the same fate as NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams for a similar crime of embellishing his “war” stories. While Williams was taken off air for six months without pay by NBC, O’Reilly has the “full support” of the president of Fox News of Roger Ailes. Different standards, you see. Williams, it’s been explained, is a trusted journalist; O’Reilly is a popular entertainer.
What O’Reilly is, is a fraud.
I say this in the wake of the ISIS beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Also for the other nearly 70 journalists who have died covering the Syrian conflict since 2011. And the 61 journalists killed worldwide in 2014 (nearly 70 percent of which, according to Committee to Protect Journalists, were covering politics). And the countless others intimidated or jailed for doing their jobs.
You’d think since Bill likes to make believe he was in combat, he’d have a kinship – a kindness for reporters in general and for war correspondents specifically. Since they’re doing what he dreamed he did on the front lines, you’d think he’d be the biggest, loudest advocate for news gatherers and the dangers (he imagines) they face.
Five journalists died in Iraq last year covering a war O’Reilly championed from his national platform. How many times has he covered their sacrifice? Zero.
Not only is he unsympathetic to the people who do what he wants his viewers to think he did – he threatened a reporter assigned to the story about his fabrications! “During a phone conversation, he told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter’s coverage was inappropriate. ‘I am coming after you with everything I have,’ Mr. O’Reilly said. ‘You can take it as a threat,’” reported the newspaper.
O’Reilly’s whole schtick has been to insult journalists and spread distrust of the media because, according to Bill, they don’t tell the truth. Hypocrisy is one way to spin it. I call it fraud.
War correspondents risk their lives every day to document conflicts, to give us the first draft of history, to keep us informed. Mostly they’re brave, unsung servants of the public interest. Hundreds of them die in this pursuit. No wonder Bill O’Reilly wants to pretend he’s one of them.
The irony, of course, is if Bill were a journalist – if we held him to any known journalistic standards – he’d be out of a job. Being a fake journalist pretending to have been in combat zones has much better job security.
That’s the truth.
[h=2]There’s Only One Thing That Could Actually Get Bill O’Reilly in Trouble, and It’s Not Lying[/h] Leslie Savan on February 27, 2015 - 1:22 PM ET
Why is it that when Brian Williams makes up war stories he loses his reputation and six months of his career, but when Bill O’Reilly spouts the same sort of chest-pounding bull, he ends up even tighter with his audience and his network?
It’s not as if O’Reilly’s fabrications were less outrageous than Williams’s. O’Reilly has claimed he was a heroic network correspondent in the “war zone” (meaning Buenos Aires) at the end of the Falklands war while his CBS colleagues were “ hiding” in a hotel. More Zelig-y than Williams, O’Reilly has repeatedly placed himself at the Florida front door of a shady figure in the investigation of JFK’s assassination just in time to hear the self-inflicted gunshot that ended the man’s life (when there’s a cascade of evidence that Bill was in Dallas at the time).
When Media Matters debunked O’Reilly’s claims to have seen four nuns “get shot in the back of the head” in El Salvador in 1981, he slickly skated away, saying he meant he had seen images of that slaughter and that “no one could possibly” misunderstand his sterling intentions. The latest of O’Reilly’s fairytales to fracture is that protesters bombarded him with rocks and bricks during the 1992 LA riots; not so, say colleagues who were there.
Not in spite of, but because of all this, O’Reilly’s TV ratings this week have surged, as fans rally to him and the curious tune in to see if the cable news giant will admit to even one substantial fib. Of course, he won’t. After countering the Falklands charges on Sunday with a misleading clip, he’s been brushing off the other charges as baseless political assaults from “liars,” “far-left zealots,” and “guttersnipes.”
Unlike NBC and the other networks, which at least aspire to fact-based reporting, it’s in Fox’s DNA to re-invent reality by massaging facts and destroying context, because, as Jon Stewart said, all that “matters to the right is discrediting anything that they believe harms their side.” One of the central tenets of Fox News is that conservative white men are under constant attack from the liberal media, and the O’Reilly flap, which was initially kicked off by Greg Grandin in The Nation and then David Corn in Mother Jones, fits that narrative all too well. (As Grandin and others point out, O’Reilly’s personal pufferies are the least of his reportorial sins.)
No matter how accurate the hits on O’Reilly’s false machismo are, they only make him seem more righteous to his audience. Liberal attacks on right-wing manliness—like pointing out the chicken-hawk status of Cheney & company—have no standing with Fox viewers. “O’Reilly has been given an opportunity to wage war against a phalanx of liberal media aggressors,” Gabriel Sherman writes in New York magazine. “This is what his audience expects.”
Is there nothing that could turn their audience away from them? Doesn’t Fox, like the rest of us, have an Achilles Heel?
Actually, they do, and it’s related to that tough-guy, manly-man act. Conservatives can bluster and bully like steroidal hysterics on any topic, but when they turn their scorn on an individual, usually younger, woman, they risk the ire of Christians, Republican women, and anyone with a working creep detector. As Sherman writes:
From O’Reilly and Limbaugh to Todd (“legitimate rape”) Akin and James O’Keefe (the GOP prankster whose plans to lure a CNN reporter onto a boat, and seduce her, in 2010, signaled his serious fade-out), sex and gender snafus appear to be one of the few reliable forms of white male kryptonite. You catch a right-winger making his sexual appetites overly vivid or venting them on an identifiable woman instead of an abstract policy, and boom!
That’s the burden of being “the Daddy Party,” and if it faces a “Mommy Party” headed by Hillary Clinton in 2016, it will be a particularly heavy one. If they launch a sexually aggressive campaign that backfires, they’ll surely feel victimized all over again.
Until then, Bill O’Reilly is safe (contrary, I think, to Maddow’s take). He and his viewers are in this together. They need just a drop of plausible deniability (Bill couldn’t have lied—he showed us a tape!) to go on accepting his nightly rants. Part of Fox’s contract with conservative Americans is the right to think magically and to (as Karl Rove told Ron Suskind) “create our own reality.”
Bill can hear a magic gunshot. He can experience war in an upscale downtown neighborhood. He can get hit by make-believe bricks.
And, for now, he can Houdini himself out of all the traps he’s set for himself.
Why is it that when Brian Williams makes up war stories he loses his reputation and six months of his career, but when Bill O’Reilly spouts the same sort of chest-pounding bull, he ends up even tighter with his audience and his network?
It’s not as if O’Reilly’s fabrications were less outrageous than Williams’s. O’Reilly has claimed he was a heroic network correspondent in the “war zone” (meaning Buenos Aires) at the end of the Falklands war while his CBS colleagues were “ hiding” in a hotel. More Zelig-y than Williams, O’Reilly has repeatedly placed himself at the Florida front door of a shady figure in the investigation of JFK’s assassination just in time to hear the self-inflicted gunshot that ended the man’s life (when there’s a cascade of evidence that Bill was in Dallas at the time).
When Media Matters debunked O’Reilly’s claims to have seen four nuns “get shot in the back of the head” in El Salvador in 1981, he slickly skated away, saying he meant he had seen images of that slaughter and that “no one could possibly” misunderstand his sterling intentions. The latest of O’Reilly’s fairytales to fracture is that protesters bombarded him with rocks and bricks during the 1992 LA riots; not so, say colleagues who were there.
Not in spite of, but because of all this, O’Reilly’s TV ratings this week have surged, as fans rally to him and the curious tune in to see if the cable news giant will admit to even one substantial fib. Of course, he won’t. After countering the Falklands charges on Sunday with a misleading clip, he’s been brushing off the other charges as baseless political assaults from “liars,” “far-left zealots,” and “guttersnipes.”
Unlike NBC and the other networks, which at least aspire to fact-based reporting, it’s in Fox’s DNA to re-invent reality by massaging facts and destroying context, because, as Jon Stewart said, all that “matters to the right is discrediting anything that they believe harms their side.” One of the central tenets of Fox News is that conservative white men are under constant attack from the liberal media, and the O’Reilly flap, which was initially kicked off by Greg Grandin in The Nation and then David Corn in Mother Jones, fits that narrative all too well. (As Grandin and others point out, O’Reilly’s personal pufferies are the least of his reportorial sins.)
No matter how accurate the hits on O’Reilly’s false machismo are, they only make him seem more righteous to his audience. Liberal attacks on right-wing manliness—like pointing out the chicken-hawk status of Cheney & company—have no standing with Fox viewers. “O’Reilly has been given an opportunity to wage war against a phalanx of liberal media aggressors,” Gabriel Sherman writes in New York magazine. “This is what his audience expects.”
Is there nothing that could turn their audience away from them? Doesn’t Fox, like the rest of us, have an Achilles Heel?
Actually, they do, and it’s related to that tough-guy, manly-man act. Conservatives can bluster and bully like steroidal hysterics on any topic, but when they turn their scorn on an individual, usually younger, woman, they risk the ire of Christians, Republican women, and anyone with a working creep detector. As Sherman writes:
One indication that O’Reilly is waging a calculated media campaign is to compare his ferocious response to a true scandal with career-ending implications: the 2004 lawsuit by a Fox News producer named Andrea Mackris, who accused O’Reilly of having lurid phone sex. In my biography of Ailes, I reported how Ailes and Rupert Murdoch were furious at O’Reilly for creating the humiliating mess. Ailes instructed O’Reilly that if he spoke out in public, he was in danger of losing his show. Aside from a handful of muted comments, O’Reilly remained silent about the allegations. His ratings held, and O’Reilly hung on to his job.
Likewise, Rush Limbaugh was seen as pretty much invincible until he, too, attacked a younger woman. In 2012, he called the then–Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a ”slut” for supporting mandated contraceptive insurance coverage. “She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex,” he said. In return, he added, he wanted Fluke to post videos of her having sex “online so we can all watch.” Advertisers began to flee the show, to the point where, according to Media Matters’s Angelo Carusone, “the commercial viability of Rush Limbaugh’s radio program has collapsed and remains that way.”
From O’Reilly and Limbaugh to Todd (“legitimate rape”) Akin and James O’Keefe (the GOP prankster whose plans to lure a CNN reporter onto a boat, and seduce her, in 2010, signaled his serious fade-out), sex and gender snafus appear to be one of the few reliable forms of white male kryptonite. You catch a right-winger making his sexual appetites overly vivid or venting them on an identifiable woman instead of an abstract policy, and boom!
That’s the burden of being “the Daddy Party,” and if it faces a “Mommy Party” headed by Hillary Clinton in 2016, it will be a particularly heavy one. If they launch a sexually aggressive campaign that backfires, they’ll surely feel victimized all over again.
Until then, Bill O’Reilly is safe (contrary, I think, to Maddow’s take). He and his viewers are in this together. They need just a drop of plausible deniability (Bill couldn’t have lied—he showed us a tape!) to go on accepting his nightly rants. Part of Fox’s contract with conservative Americans is the right to think magically and to (as Karl Rove told Ron Suskind) “create our own reality.”
Bill can hear a magic gunshot. He can experience war in an upscale downtown neighborhood. He can get hit by make-believe bricks.
And, for now, he can Houdini himself out of all the traps he’s set for himself.
Why is it that the weak and feeble minded lefties always have to have a boogie man to rail against?
Whether it is stalking a poster on an obscure political board as being a terrorist supporter or Bill O'reilly and Fox news the simple minded person always has to project their fears and doubts on a "boogieman".
Whether it is stalking a poster on an obscure political board as being a terrorist supporter or Bill O'reilly and Fox news the simple minded person always has to project their fears and doubts on a "boogieman".
