As usual, this idiot portrays it as a right/left issue rather than a truth/lying issue because in his feeble mind, only one side lies. Dave is a PROVEN Terrorist Supporter by his own words- FACT. O'Reilly is a proven liar/exaggerator by his own words- FACT. So is Brian Williams, so is Obama, so is Hillary.
As usual, this idiot portrays it as a right/left issue rather than a truth/lying issue because in his feeble mind, only one side lies. Dave is a PROVEN Terrorist Supporter by his own words- FACT. O'Reilly is a proven liar/exaggerator by his own words- FACT. So is Brian Williams, so is Obama, so is Hillary.
Go Ahead and Call Bill O'Reilly What He Is: A Pathological Liar
The Fox News mouthpiece leapt on Brian Williams with a predatory recognition of common weakness
By Jeb Lund March 5, 2015
Bill O'Reilly Bill O'Reilly on NBC News' "Today" show. Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty
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.
A real American doesn't tolerate that kind of crap, and Bill O'Reilly is a real American. He has evolved into a post-fact reality, nightly defending a singular nation of fear and confabulation against all enemies foreign and domestic. He is a fiction more palpable than himself, and he can't stop, because it's all he has.
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.
That article and O'Reilly's pummeling Brian Williams inspired Mother Jones' David Corn and Daniel Schulman to look closely at O'Reilly's other tales of hazardous, daring reportage, including his claims to have been in a "war zone" during the Falklands War. Despite O'Reilly's calling Corn a "despicable guttersnipe" and attempting to handwave away the accusations as a liberal hit job, Corn and Shulman's charges have stuck. The nearest O'Reilly — or any other American reporter — got to the war zone was 1,200 miles, and his fallback assertion that protests he "alone" covered in Buenos Aires constituted one have been debunked multiple times over by O'Reilly's former colleagues. Worse, O'Reilly's own footage contradicts his story that he had a gun pulled on him.
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. He claimed his tabloid show Inside Edition won two Peabody Awards. He turned a comfortable childhood in the post-war suburban planned community of Levittown (with regular Florida vacations) into an Oliver Twist-tinged struggle, to complete the Horatio Alger arc corporealizing him as the American dream: "You don't come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale." Those who would dare wake him from it are met with violence. "I am coming after you with everything I have," he told the New York Times' Emily Steel. "You can take it as a threat."
The dream subsumes the rest of the world. Fact has been so incorporated into the fictive in O'Reilly's mind that he genuinely seems incapable of distinguishing between the two. When pressed to defend his Falklands story, he cited Those Who Trespass. "That was the first book that I wrote. Soup to nuts, what happened in Buenos Aires during the Falklands war."
It's a novel.
It's all in there. O'Reilly's Falklands War story appears, identical to the one he tells in real life. His coverage of the L.A. riots sends ratings "through the roof." There are even fictional big boobs to match Andrea Mackris' big boobs. He then explores the duality of man by making his book's anti-hero news anchor and heroic Irish detective virtual clones of himself.
One O'Reilly grew up poor in Levittown, while another lived outside Miami. One O'Reilly, "at Boston University. . .played halfback on the varsity football team," fulfilling the dream that real-life prevaricating Marist College club football player Bill O'Reilly wishes were true. (Through all his rugged Irish-Americanness, you can practically hear his soul screaming to be thrown the deep ball by Jack, burning past Bobby and Teddy on defense in a touch football game in Hyannis Port.) One O'Reilly covered the troubles in Northern Ireland. One has a no-nonsense street cop demeanor. Another has his successful broadcast network career thwarted by pinheads who can't see his value, including one obvious stand-in for CBS' Bob Schieffer, who bigfoots O'Reilly's Buenos Aires "riots" story and, for his crimes, has this happen:
The [anti-hero Bill O'Reilly's] right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of [the Bob Schieffer stand-in's] mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem.
When discussing his murders, his anti-hero version adopts the IRA term "sanctions" for the killing of enemies to a good Irish cause. (O'Reilly is nothing if not an American ethnic poseur.) Later, as his hero self reflects on the murders of his anti-hero — which include throwing someone off a balcony, waterboarding someone to death via a rising tide and traveling incognito by plane to slash someone's throat with a boxcutter, like a good non-terrorist patriot — he can't even bring himself to outright condemn them. "That’s what makes this such a tough case," he thinks. "The people [the anti-hero Bill O'Reilly] has killed were all morally bankrupt. The dregs of the Earth."
The first unsettling takeaway from the book is that, once laid atop the patterns of O'Reilly's real life, one is surprised to realize that Bill O'Reilly hasn't actually murdered anyone yet. The second is this: that the stories Bill tells as fiction are nearly identical to the fictions he tells himself and his viewers. The Nation and Mother Jones might have caught him out on the details, but he was telling us he is a vengeful, unhinged fabulist this entire time.
***
There are two schools of thought on what to do with this information about Bill O'Reilly. The first comes from Gabriel Sherman (on whose indispensable book I relied on for a podcast review of Those Who Trespass). It goes like this: Fox News and Bill O'Reilly are part of a larger right-wing victim complex that feeds on attack because the attacks confirm their false narrative of being besieged "truth-tellers" so dangerous to the left-wing academic-government complex that deranged libturds will try to silence them via any possible smear.
undefined
Sherman's reading is correct, and I won't put words in his mouth by drawing any conclusions about what action he thinks should be undertaken. That said, there is no shortage of online strategists and sages who will tell you not to bother going after O'Reilly and Fox for the same reason that people tell you, "Don't feed the trolls." Fuck that. This chickenshit attitude ultimately lets trolls like O'Reilly win by default. They win when they attack you, they win when you attack them, they win when you go silent. It's the same line of thinking that tells feminist writers threatened by online rapists that they should just delete their accounts and hope their profiles go away for long enough to no longer be provocative to scum.
What consequence is there for real journalistic organizations anymore when it comes to going after O'Reilly? They get called attackers? O'Reilly calls them attackers merely for reporting facts inconsistent with his epistemic bubble. His fans aren't going to watch or read those other sites or channels? They don't already. By this point, O'Reilly has trained his audience to consider digesting independent news an act of race treason on par with slaveowners letting negroes learn to read.
O'Reilly needs his opponents to quail at the endurance needed for challenge. He needs them to feel too sheepish about drawing attention to themselves (and risk being flagged by endowed right-wing media watchdogs for "bias") and to want to slink away before conspiracy can be applied to mere professionalism. The response will be the same no matter the offense, so go ahead and call Bill O'Reilly what he is. A pathological liar and a paper tiger elevated to a glass desk in front of millions of people he wants to be as scared as he is of the intruding world. Let him revel in being attacked, then keep calling him the same things, and repeating them until they're the only Google search result anymore. What's he going to do? Sue historicity?
O'Reilly isn't a newsman, he's a blue-eyed cirrhotic cyst erupting acid onto the brass rail at the Now I'll Tell You What the REAL Problem Is Pub. He's the guy who sits next to you and brags about how he'd kick the hell out of any thugs daring to bring violence into his neighborhood, stumbles off his barstool, goes outside, reflexively crosses the street to avoid two black kids on the sidewalk two blocks up, then drives home drunk. He's the guy who picks a fight with you if you correct him, then refuses to throw down because he "was Gold Gloves in college and doesn't want to end you, man," then backs away toward his driveway while trying to make eye contact with anyone he thinks is a friend and saying, "I feel sorry for him! I have a pool in my backyard."
Because that's the other school of thought about Bill O'Reilly, and something that explains why he leapt on Brian Williams with a predatory recognition of common weakness. O'Reilly long ago turned up the volume on his Real American Thug schtick to drown out the fact that almost everything he has to say is either a lie, bullying or a deracinated piece of non-data. As part of that, he understood something that Brian Williams did: that there is nothing more authentic than a classic American tough guy who's seen combat.
The only real American group virtually impervious to criticism anymore are soldiers. Of all the lessons we could have learned from Vietnam, the one we took away is that they can never fail but only be failed. Republicans fail them by omitting clear goals, exit strategies and promising only more bodies and bombs. Democrats fail them via what conservatives see as an American Dolchstoßlegende. When they fail themselves, the impact either fades away or reifies them — Lynndie England, the soldiers of Haditha and William Calley either trivialized, forgotten or lionized on the cover of Esquire in spite of everything. In every way but the dearest, they are bulletproof.
Brian Williams was a dull man whose job was telling other people's stories and seeming essential in spite of that. He knew that the shortest route to authenticity — to appearing to have a resolute and genuine message, to confirm himself as something more solid than a haircut — was not only to be shot at like soldiers but be esteemed and given gifts by them as well. That's how tempting the Troop Housekeeping SEAL of Approval is: Williams could have had zero original thoughts for decades and walked away with millions of dollars, and instead he needed to seem heroic to people who probably didn't even think to ask if he wasn't.
That same desire burns in Bill O'Reilly with an intensity that manifests as sociopathy. He's just aware enough to know he shovels shit for a living and is lucky if he's not contradicting himself from one day to the next. Bill O'Reilly is all ad hominem because he has nothing else. In an atmosphere devoid of facts, a legend will have to do, and those who challenge it must be shouted down, threatened or "sanctioned" to intimidate anyone else who might threaten to puncture him next.
The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the L.A. Riots, even Levittown — all falsehoods mired in death or toil — elevate him to a standard of heroism where questions aren't allowed anymore. Like critics of all good American legends, people who insist on mentioning facts about him are losers and college students, people who lack love and loyalty, whose smartassed treason merits justice swift, uncompromising and unmerciful. If Bill O'Reilly can just prove to you that he's seen enough combat in service of this country, then no amount of violence and no fiction is impermissible. Give him time to tell enough stories, and he may even ascend to an unassailable, ethereal plane. One of these days, Bill O'Reilly will be so real it won't even matter if anything about him is true anymore.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...is-a-pathological-liar-20150305#ixzz3TfajynQg
The Fox News mouthpiece leapt on Brian Williams with a predatory recognition of common weakness
By Jeb Lund March 5, 2015
Bill O'Reilly Bill O'Reilly on NBC News' "Today" show. Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty
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.
A real American doesn't tolerate that kind of crap, and Bill O'Reilly is a real American. He has evolved into a post-fact reality, nightly defending a singular nation of fear and confabulation against all enemies foreign and domestic. He is a fiction more palpable than himself, and he can't stop, because it's all he has.
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.
That article and O'Reilly's pummeling Brian Williams inspired Mother Jones' David Corn and Daniel Schulman to look closely at O'Reilly's other tales of hazardous, daring reportage, including his claims to have been in a "war zone" during the Falklands War. Despite O'Reilly's calling Corn a "despicable guttersnipe" and attempting to handwave away the accusations as a liberal hit job, Corn and Shulman's charges have stuck. The nearest O'Reilly — or any other American reporter — got to the war zone was 1,200 miles, and his fallback assertion that protests he "alone" covered in Buenos Aires constituted one have been debunked multiple times over by O'Reilly's former colleagues. Worse, O'Reilly's own footage contradicts his story that he had a gun pulled on him.
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. He claimed his tabloid show Inside Edition won two Peabody Awards. He turned a comfortable childhood in the post-war suburban planned community of Levittown (with regular Florida vacations) into an Oliver Twist-tinged struggle, to complete the Horatio Alger arc corporealizing him as the American dream: "You don't come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale." Those who would dare wake him from it are met with violence. "I am coming after you with everything I have," he told the New York Times' Emily Steel. "You can take it as a threat."
The dream subsumes the rest of the world. Fact has been so incorporated into the fictive in O'Reilly's mind that he genuinely seems incapable of distinguishing between the two. When pressed to defend his Falklands story, he cited Those Who Trespass. "That was the first book that I wrote. Soup to nuts, what happened in Buenos Aires during the Falklands war."
It's a novel.
It's all in there. O'Reilly's Falklands War story appears, identical to the one he tells in real life. His coverage of the L.A. riots sends ratings "through the roof." There are even fictional big boobs to match Andrea Mackris' big boobs. He then explores the duality of man by making his book's anti-hero news anchor and heroic Irish detective virtual clones of himself.
One O'Reilly grew up poor in Levittown, while another lived outside Miami. One O'Reilly, "at Boston University. . .played halfback on the varsity football team," fulfilling the dream that real-life prevaricating Marist College club football player Bill O'Reilly wishes were true. (Through all his rugged Irish-Americanness, you can practically hear his soul screaming to be thrown the deep ball by Jack, burning past Bobby and Teddy on defense in a touch football game in Hyannis Port.) One O'Reilly covered the troubles in Northern Ireland. One has a no-nonsense street cop demeanor. Another has his successful broadcast network career thwarted by pinheads who can't see his value, including one obvious stand-in for CBS' Bob Schieffer, who bigfoots O'Reilly's Buenos Aires "riots" story and, for his crimes, has this happen:
The [anti-hero Bill O'Reilly's] right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of [the Bob Schieffer stand-in's] mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem.
When discussing his murders, his anti-hero version adopts the IRA term "sanctions" for the killing of enemies to a good Irish cause. (O'Reilly is nothing if not an American ethnic poseur.) Later, as his hero self reflects on the murders of his anti-hero — which include throwing someone off a balcony, waterboarding someone to death via a rising tide and traveling incognito by plane to slash someone's throat with a boxcutter, like a good non-terrorist patriot — he can't even bring himself to outright condemn them. "That’s what makes this such a tough case," he thinks. "The people [the anti-hero Bill O'Reilly] has killed were all morally bankrupt. The dregs of the Earth."
The first unsettling takeaway from the book is that, once laid atop the patterns of O'Reilly's real life, one is surprised to realize that Bill O'Reilly hasn't actually murdered anyone yet. The second is this: that the stories Bill tells as fiction are nearly identical to the fictions he tells himself and his viewers. The Nation and Mother Jones might have caught him out on the details, but he was telling us he is a vengeful, unhinged fabulist this entire time.
***
There are two schools of thought on what to do with this information about Bill O'Reilly. The first comes from Gabriel Sherman (on whose indispensable book I relied on for a podcast review of Those Who Trespass). It goes like this: Fox News and Bill O'Reilly are part of a larger right-wing victim complex that feeds on attack because the attacks confirm their false narrative of being besieged "truth-tellers" so dangerous to the left-wing academic-government complex that deranged libturds will try to silence them via any possible smear.
undefined
Sherman's reading is correct, and I won't put words in his mouth by drawing any conclusions about what action he thinks should be undertaken. That said, there is no shortage of online strategists and sages who will tell you not to bother going after O'Reilly and Fox for the same reason that people tell you, "Don't feed the trolls." Fuck that. This chickenshit attitude ultimately lets trolls like O'Reilly win by default. They win when they attack you, they win when you attack them, they win when you go silent. It's the same line of thinking that tells feminist writers threatened by online rapists that they should just delete their accounts and hope their profiles go away for long enough to no longer be provocative to scum.
What consequence is there for real journalistic organizations anymore when it comes to going after O'Reilly? They get called attackers? O'Reilly calls them attackers merely for reporting facts inconsistent with his epistemic bubble. His fans aren't going to watch or read those other sites or channels? They don't already. By this point, O'Reilly has trained his audience to consider digesting independent news an act of race treason on par with slaveowners letting negroes learn to read.
O'Reilly needs his opponents to quail at the endurance needed for challenge. He needs them to feel too sheepish about drawing attention to themselves (and risk being flagged by endowed right-wing media watchdogs for "bias") and to want to slink away before conspiracy can be applied to mere professionalism. The response will be the same no matter the offense, so go ahead and call Bill O'Reilly what he is. A pathological liar and a paper tiger elevated to a glass desk in front of millions of people he wants to be as scared as he is of the intruding world. Let him revel in being attacked, then keep calling him the same things, and repeating them until they're the only Google search result anymore. What's he going to do? Sue historicity?
O'Reilly isn't a newsman, he's a blue-eyed cirrhotic cyst erupting acid onto the brass rail at the Now I'll Tell You What the REAL Problem Is Pub. He's the guy who sits next to you and brags about how he'd kick the hell out of any thugs daring to bring violence into his neighborhood, stumbles off his barstool, goes outside, reflexively crosses the street to avoid two black kids on the sidewalk two blocks up, then drives home drunk. He's the guy who picks a fight with you if you correct him, then refuses to throw down because he "was Gold Gloves in college and doesn't want to end you, man," then backs away toward his driveway while trying to make eye contact with anyone he thinks is a friend and saying, "I feel sorry for him! I have a pool in my backyard."
Because that's the other school of thought about Bill O'Reilly, and something that explains why he leapt on Brian Williams with a predatory recognition of common weakness. O'Reilly long ago turned up the volume on his Real American Thug schtick to drown out the fact that almost everything he has to say is either a lie, bullying or a deracinated piece of non-data. As part of that, he understood something that Brian Williams did: that there is nothing more authentic than a classic American tough guy who's seen combat.
The only real American group virtually impervious to criticism anymore are soldiers. Of all the lessons we could have learned from Vietnam, the one we took away is that they can never fail but only be failed. Republicans fail them by omitting clear goals, exit strategies and promising only more bodies and bombs. Democrats fail them via what conservatives see as an American Dolchstoßlegende. When they fail themselves, the impact either fades away or reifies them — Lynndie England, the soldiers of Haditha and William Calley either trivialized, forgotten or lionized on the cover of Esquire in spite of everything. In every way but the dearest, they are bulletproof.
Brian Williams was a dull man whose job was telling other people's stories and seeming essential in spite of that. He knew that the shortest route to authenticity — to appearing to have a resolute and genuine message, to confirm himself as something more solid than a haircut — was not only to be shot at like soldiers but be esteemed and given gifts by them as well. That's how tempting the Troop Housekeeping SEAL of Approval is: Williams could have had zero original thoughts for decades and walked away with millions of dollars, and instead he needed to seem heroic to people who probably didn't even think to ask if he wasn't.
That same desire burns in Bill O'Reilly with an intensity that manifests as sociopathy. He's just aware enough to know he shovels shit for a living and is lucky if he's not contradicting himself from one day to the next. Bill O'Reilly is all ad hominem because he has nothing else. In an atmosphere devoid of facts, a legend will have to do, and those who challenge it must be shouted down, threatened or "sanctioned" to intimidate anyone else who might threaten to puncture him next.
The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the L.A. Riots, even Levittown — all falsehoods mired in death or toil — elevate him to a standard of heroism where questions aren't allowed anymore. Like critics of all good American legends, people who insist on mentioning facts about him are losers and college students, people who lack love and loyalty, whose smartassed treason merits justice swift, uncompromising and unmerciful. If Bill O'Reilly can just prove to you that he's seen enough combat in service of this country, then no amount of violence and no fiction is impermissible. Give him time to tell enough stories, and he may even ascend to an unassailable, ethereal plane. One of these days, Bill O'Reilly will be so real it won't even matter if anything about him is true anymore.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...is-a-pathological-liar-20150305#ixzz3TfajynQg
[h=1]“No one expects the truth”: The secret to Bill O’Reilly’s professional survival[/h] [h=2]Want to know why Fox News' main bully evades consequences for his constant lies? Those close to him have the answer VIDEO[/h] Brad Friedman'Reilly Factor" This post originally appeared on The BRAD BLOG.
The longtime former host of the Fox “News” media critique program, Fox News Watch, took to CNN on Sunday to blast both Fox and his former colleague Bill O’Reilly during an appearance on Brian Stelter’s weekend media show, Reliable Sources.
“I think it’s astonishing that that’s the way they operate,” Burns said, describing Fox’ failure to take any action against their prime time star in light of documented evidence that O’Reilly wholly mischaracterized and/or blatantly lied about his coverage of the Falklands War, bombings in Northern Ireland, the murder of nuns in El Salvador, and the suicide of a key player in the JFK assassination saga, to name just a few cases recently brought to light by others in the non-wingnut media.
Eric Burns, who worked at Fox for years before finally leaving in 2008, described the channel as a “cult” of “extreme right”, and described O’Reilly as both the leader of that cult and a “liar.”
Burns went on to describe how O’Reilly has been caught telling “numerous lies” over the years by, among others, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann who used “all the evidence possible” to detail the fabrications. But, he explained, because the lies were told at Fox, nobody cared.
“No one expects much out of O’Reilly as a Fox News host,” said Burns. “No one expects the truth.”
The way to understand what is going on right now at Fox in the wake of the allegations against O’Reilly, Burns explained, “is to make a distinction between the words ‘culture’ and ‘cult.’”
The man who, for a decade, hosted his own weekly show on FNC, described the people who watch the channel as “cultish”.
“For many years, conservatives have been extremely upset in this country because the only newscasts they had to watch were liberal — you people at CNN and how liberal you are, and NBC and ABC and CBS — and they never had, the extreme right, they never had their own television station. When they got one, their appreciation, their audience loyalty — and I know what the audience loyalty was like when I was there — their audience loyalty soared.”
“And, so, O’Reilly, as the head of the cult, is not held to the same standards as [NBC News'] Brian Williams, who was part of the media culture, the larger culture,” said Burns.
“Every time, it seems, that O’Reilly lies — and, he’s lied so many times,” charged Burns, the fabrications were often documented by Olbermann, whose Countdown program ran opposite The O’Reilly Factor on Fox for years.
“Every time there was a charge that was made by Olbermann about something that O’Reilly had said or done that was a complete fabrication…it was completely substantiated. I mean Olbermann had all the evidence possible.”
Stelter was curious how Burns handled working with O’Reilly in the same building during all of those years.
“Well, since he was so unfriendly,” Burns replied, “it was easy to handle. I’d run into him occasionally. I’d say ‘Hi, Bill’, and without deigning to call me by name, he’d say ‘Hi.’ That’s how I handled it. That was it.”
Stelter then asked about his earlier assertion that Fox “caters to the extreme right.”
“I thought that as Fox got more and more popular, that Roger Ailes, who runs the network, would think: ‘Well, the Right has nowhere else to go, so if I move a little more to the center, I can get a bigger audience and not lose my core audience’,” said Burns. “He did just the opposite. He went more to the right.”
He went on to say that most of the charges being detailed now by the mainstream media are from matters that occurred when O’Reilly was a CBS News reporter decades ago.
“No one expects much out of O’Reilly as a Fox News host,” said Burns. “No one expects the truth. He’s been caught in numerous lies and those have never been a story.”
“We have a story now for two reasons. One is context — Brian Williams has set up the media to be looking for things like this. And the second reason is that O’Reilly did what he was supposed to have done, when he was with CBS. It doesn’t matter that he does it with Fox. But when he did it with one of the major networks, the attempt is to make more of a story out of it. Yet, the cult, the Fox News cult — to the Fox News cult — this kind of thing doesn’t matter.”
Fox viewers see it all as little more than “a lie from the ‘liberal media’. Who cares what it is? The point is, it doesn’t matter.”
As for those who run Fox, and their failure to substantively address the documented facts about their star anchor: “They’re not addressing the controversy. If you’re charged with lying and you say ‘our ratings are up’, you’re not answering the question of whether or not you told a lie. I think it’s astonishing that that’s the way they operate.”
The longtime former host of the Fox “News” media critique program, Fox News Watch, took to CNN on Sunday to blast both Fox and his former colleague Bill O’Reilly during an appearance on Brian Stelter’s weekend media show, Reliable Sources.
“I think it’s astonishing that that’s the way they operate,” Burns said, describing Fox’ failure to take any action against their prime time star in light of documented evidence that O’Reilly wholly mischaracterized and/or blatantly lied about his coverage of the Falklands War, bombings in Northern Ireland, the murder of nuns in El Salvador, and the suicide of a key player in the JFK assassination saga, to name just a few cases recently brought to light by others in the non-wingnut media.
Eric Burns, who worked at Fox for years before finally leaving in 2008, described the channel as a “cult” of “extreme right”, and described O’Reilly as both the leader of that cult and a “liar.”
Burns went on to describe how O’Reilly has been caught telling “numerous lies” over the years by, among others, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann who used “all the evidence possible” to detail the fabrications. But, he explained, because the lies were told at Fox, nobody cared.
“No one expects much out of O’Reilly as a Fox News host,” said Burns. “No one expects the truth.”
The way to understand what is going on right now at Fox in the wake of the allegations against O’Reilly, Burns explained, “is to make a distinction between the words ‘culture’ and ‘cult.’”
The man who, for a decade, hosted his own weekly show on FNC, described the people who watch the channel as “cultish”.
“For many years, conservatives have been extremely upset in this country because the only newscasts they had to watch were liberal — you people at CNN and how liberal you are, and NBC and ABC and CBS — and they never had, the extreme right, they never had their own television station. When they got one, their appreciation, their audience loyalty — and I know what the audience loyalty was like when I was there — their audience loyalty soared.”
“And, so, O’Reilly, as the head of the cult, is not held to the same standards as [NBC News'] Brian Williams, who was part of the media culture, the larger culture,” said Burns.
“Every time, it seems, that O’Reilly lies — and, he’s lied so many times,” charged Burns, the fabrications were often documented by Olbermann, whose Countdown program ran opposite The O’Reilly Factor on Fox for years.
“Every time there was a charge that was made by Olbermann about something that O’Reilly had said or done that was a complete fabrication…it was completely substantiated. I mean Olbermann had all the evidence possible.”
Stelter was curious how Burns handled working with O’Reilly in the same building during all of those years.
“Well, since he was so unfriendly,” Burns replied, “it was easy to handle. I’d run into him occasionally. I’d say ‘Hi, Bill’, and without deigning to call me by name, he’d say ‘Hi.’ That’s how I handled it. That was it.”
Stelter then asked about his earlier assertion that Fox “caters to the extreme right.”
“I thought that as Fox got more and more popular, that Roger Ailes, who runs the network, would think: ‘Well, the Right has nowhere else to go, so if I move a little more to the center, I can get a bigger audience and not lose my core audience’,” said Burns. “He did just the opposite. He went more to the right.”
He went on to say that most of the charges being detailed now by the mainstream media are from matters that occurred when O’Reilly was a CBS News reporter decades ago.
“No one expects much out of O’Reilly as a Fox News host,” said Burns. “No one expects the truth. He’s been caught in numerous lies and those have never been a story.”
“We have a story now for two reasons. One is context — Brian Williams has set up the media to be looking for things like this. And the second reason is that O’Reilly did what he was supposed to have done, when he was with CBS. It doesn’t matter that he does it with Fox. But when he did it with one of the major networks, the attempt is to make more of a story out of it. Yet, the cult, the Fox News cult — to the Fox News cult — this kind of thing doesn’t matter.”
Fox viewers see it all as little more than “a lie from the ‘liberal media’. Who cares what it is? The point is, it doesn’t matter.”
As for those who run Fox, and their failure to substantively address the documented facts about their star anchor: “They’re not addressing the controversy. If you’re charged with lying and you say ‘our ratings are up’, you’re not answering the question of whether or not you told a lie. I think it’s astonishing that that’s the way they operate.”
[h=1]Bill O'Reilly celebrates post-controversy ratings spike[/h]
By Tom Kludt @tomkludt
[h=2]Bill O'Reilly gave a winner's smile Tuesday as he shrugged off recent claims that he had exaggerated his exploits and said viewers expressed their trust in him with a surge in the size of his audience.[/h] "So we had a controversy there and we put forth what my side was, they put forth what their side was," O'Reilly said during an appearance on the "Late Show with David Letterman." "Folks decided, and you know, it worked out OK for me. I got even more viewers."
The Fox News host also came to the defense of Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor who has been suspended after falsely claiming to be in a helicopter that was shot down in Iraq in 2003. NBC "should bring him back," O'Reilly said.
"We have a sport in the United States that's called Let's Destroy the Famous Person. That's what happened to him," O'Reilly said.
O'Reilly appeared on the "Late Show" to promote "Killing Jesus," National Geographic Channel's latest film adaptation of his book series on the deaths of various historical icons.
Related: Bill O'Reilly's 'Killing' machine has sold 6.8 million books
During Tuesday's show, Letterman asked O'Reilly, "Have you ever fibbed on the air?"
"Not that I know of," O'Reilly said. "What I do is analysis, different from what other people do."
Already the top-rated show on cable news, "The O'Reilly Factor" saw a significant ratings spike last month after Mother Jones reported on the host's exaggerated accounts of covering the Falklands War in 1982. Ratings for the "Factor" also went up when O'Reilly was embroiled in a sexual harassment suit with a former producer in 2004.
O'Reilly told Letterman on Tuesday that his ratings are "twenty percent up" in the wake of the recent controversy.
"When people thought you were making stuff up -- " a skeptical Letterman observed.
"But they didn't think that," O'Reilly interjected. "But they didn't think that because I hit it immediately hard and I said, 'Look, this is the facts, this is what happened."
O'Reilly employed a ferocious response last month after questions were raised about his Falklands accounts.
Mother Jones reported that O'Reilly has repeatedly claimed to have covered the conflict from a "war zone," despite the fact that he was based in Buenos Aires -- thousands of miles from the battlefield. O'Reilly's account of a protest in Buenos Aires that erupted at the conclusion of the Falklands War has also been questioned.
In several interviews after the Mother Jones story ran, O'Reilly mounted a furious rebuttal. He disparaged David Corn, a co-author of the Mother Jones story, and insisted that he never embellished his experience covering the war.
Some of O'Reilly's other accounts have also been disputed.
He was forced to clarify comments he made about witnessing nuns shot in the back of the head during the civil war in El Salvador and that he saw people in Northern Ireland "kill and maim their fellow citizens." O'Reilly later admitted he only saw photos of those atrocities.
O'Reilly has yet to address a recording of a phone conversation that appears to contradict his claim to have been at the scene in 1977 when an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald killed himself in Florida.
O'Reilly said his credibility is reflected in his ratings supremacy.
"I've been on the air, 19th season now," O'Reilly told Letterman. "Fifteen years at number one. Our ratings now are as high as they've ever been. So I think they do trust me, and I'm glad they do."
By Tom Kludt @tomkludt
The Fox News host also came to the defense of Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor who has been suspended after falsely claiming to be in a helicopter that was shot down in Iraq in 2003. NBC "should bring him back," O'Reilly said.
"We have a sport in the United States that's called Let's Destroy the Famous Person. That's what happened to him," O'Reilly said.
O'Reilly appeared on the "Late Show" to promote "Killing Jesus," National Geographic Channel's latest film adaptation of his book series on the deaths of various historical icons.
Related: Bill O'Reilly's 'Killing' machine has sold 6.8 million books
During Tuesday's show, Letterman asked O'Reilly, "Have you ever fibbed on the air?"
"Not that I know of," O'Reilly said. "What I do is analysis, different from what other people do."
Already the top-rated show on cable news, "The O'Reilly Factor" saw a significant ratings spike last month after Mother Jones reported on the host's exaggerated accounts of covering the Falklands War in 1982. Ratings for the "Factor" also went up when O'Reilly was embroiled in a sexual harassment suit with a former producer in 2004.
O'Reilly told Letterman on Tuesday that his ratings are "twenty percent up" in the wake of the recent controversy.
"When people thought you were making stuff up -- " a skeptical Letterman observed.
"But they didn't think that," O'Reilly interjected. "But they didn't think that because I hit it immediately hard and I said, 'Look, this is the facts, this is what happened."
O'Reilly employed a ferocious response last month after questions were raised about his Falklands accounts.
Mother Jones reported that O'Reilly has repeatedly claimed to have covered the conflict from a "war zone," despite the fact that he was based in Buenos Aires -- thousands of miles from the battlefield. O'Reilly's account of a protest in Buenos Aires that erupted at the conclusion of the Falklands War has also been questioned.
In several interviews after the Mother Jones story ran, O'Reilly mounted a furious rebuttal. He disparaged David Corn, a co-author of the Mother Jones story, and insisted that he never embellished his experience covering the war.
Some of O'Reilly's other accounts have also been disputed.
He was forced to clarify comments he made about witnessing nuns shot in the back of the head during the civil war in El Salvador and that he saw people in Northern Ireland "kill and maim their fellow citizens." O'Reilly later admitted he only saw photos of those atrocities.
O'Reilly has yet to address a recording of a phone conversation that appears to contradict his claim to have been at the scene in 1977 when an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald killed himself in Florida.
O'Reilly said his credibility is reflected in his ratings supremacy.
"I've been on the air, 19th season now," O'Reilly told Letterman. "Fifteen years at number one. Our ratings now are as high as they've ever been. So I think they do trust me, and I'm glad they do."
Of course his lying, hypocrisy, and disgusting behavior don't matter to the sick cult. He has great ratings. 
hno:
[h=1]New details from Bill O’Reilly’s custody trial paint him as absent father with violent, unpredictable temper[/h] [h=2]Teen daughter says he's too old to "act like an idiot" when he's angry[/h] Joanna Rothkopf On Monday, Gawker reported that during Fox News moralizer Bill O’Reilly’s custody dispute with ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy, his 16-year-old daughter had recounted seeing her father grab McPhilmy by the throat and drag her down a staircase. Now, the website has obtained partial transcripts from the trial, corroborating the account.
The transcript includes testimony from Larry Cohen, a psychologist appointed to interview and make assessments about each member of the family during the dispute. (Note that “M.” refers to O’Reilly’s daughter.)
“M. reported — having seeing an incident where I believe she said her dad was choking her mom or had his hands around her neck and dragged her down some stairs.”
Cohen was later asked what sorts of things O’Reilly would say to the daughter about McPhilmy. He replied, “That she is an adulterer, and that her husband is, M.’s new stepfather is not a good person, and oh, if she spends her time or more time at the mother’s home, it will ruin her life.”
The transcripts also depict an absent father (M. said he was “never” around) and a man with a terrible temper who would go “ballistic,” which M. described as “scary and demeaning.”
Cohen recounts: “When I asked dad what he meant by going ballistic, he said that he would, quote, act like an idiot, close quote, which he can no longer do at his age or he can institute Plan B, which would be going out, hitting a tree or yelling and moaning. He said he worked hard to keep his emotions under control.”
The Fox News host has repeatedly blasted the black community for its epidemic of absent fathers and the dissolution of the American family. He also, notably, sexually harassed former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris in 2004.
O’Reilly denied the accusations in a statement made to Politico: “All allegations against me in these circumstances are 100 percent false. I am going to respect the court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect my children and will not comment any further.”
hno:[h=1]New details from Bill O’Reilly’s custody trial paint him as absent father with violent, unpredictable temper[/h] [h=2]Teen daughter says he's too old to "act like an idiot" when he's angry[/h] Joanna Rothkopf On Monday, Gawker reported that during Fox News moralizer Bill O’Reilly’s custody dispute with ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy, his 16-year-old daughter had recounted seeing her father grab McPhilmy by the throat and drag her down a staircase. Now, the website has obtained partial transcripts from the trial, corroborating the account.
The transcript includes testimony from Larry Cohen, a psychologist appointed to interview and make assessments about each member of the family during the dispute. (Note that “M.” refers to O’Reilly’s daughter.)
“M. reported — having seeing an incident where I believe she said her dad was choking her mom or had his hands around her neck and dragged her down some stairs.”
Cohen was later asked what sorts of things O’Reilly would say to the daughter about McPhilmy. He replied, “That she is an adulterer, and that her husband is, M.’s new stepfather is not a good person, and oh, if she spends her time or more time at the mother’s home, it will ruin her life.”
The transcripts also depict an absent father (M. said he was “never” around) and a man with a terrible temper who would go “ballistic,” which M. described as “scary and demeaning.”
Cohen recounts: “When I asked dad what he meant by going ballistic, he said that he would, quote, act like an idiot, close quote, which he can no longer do at his age or he can institute Plan B, which would be going out, hitting a tree or yelling and moaning. He said he worked hard to keep his emotions under control.”
The Fox News host has repeatedly blasted the black community for its epidemic of absent fathers and the dissolution of the American family. He also, notably, sexually harassed former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris in 2004.
O’Reilly denied the accusations in a statement made to Politico: “All allegations against me in these circumstances are 100 percent false. I am going to respect the court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect my children and will not comment any further.”
Of course his lying, hypocrisy, and disgusting behavior don't matter to the sick cult. He has great ratings.
New details from Bill O’Reilly’s custody trial paint him as absent father with violent, unpredictable temper
Teen daughter says he's too old to "act like an idiot" when he's angry
Joanna Rothkopf On Monday, Gawker reported that during Fox News moralizer Bill O’Reilly’s custody dispute with ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy, his 16-year-old daughter had recounted seeing her father grab McPhilmy by the throat and drag her down a staircase. Now, the website has obtained partial transcripts from the trial, corroborating the account.
The transcript includes testimony from Larry Cohen, a psychologist appointed to interview and make assessments about each member of the family during the dispute. (Note that “M.” refers to O’Reilly’s daughter.)
“M. reported — having seeing an incident where I believe she said her dad was choking her mom or had his hands around her neck and dragged her down some stairs.”
Cohen was later asked what sorts of things O’Reilly would say to the daughter about McPhilmy. He replied, “That she is an adulterer, and that her husband is, M.’s new stepfather is not a good person, and oh, if she spends her time or more time at the mother’s home, it will ruin her life.”
The transcripts also depict an absent father (M. said he was “never” around) and a man with a terrible temper who would go “ballistic,” which M. described as “scary and demeaning.”
Cohen recounts: “When I asked dad what he meant by going ballistic, he said that he would, quote, act like an idiot, close quote, which he can no longer do at his age or he can institute Plan B, which would be going out, hitting a tree or yelling and moaning. He said he worked hard to keep his emotions under control.”
The Fox News host has repeatedly blasted the black community for its epidemic of absent fathers and the dissolution of the American family. He also, notably, sexually harassed former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris in 2004.
O’Reilly denied the accusations in a statement made to Politico: “All allegations against me in these circumstances are 100 percent false. I am going to respect the court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect my children and will not comment any further.”
Keep digging pal.
Maybe there are a few parking tickets in the 90's he was late paying or didn't tip the paperboy enough in 1979 because the paper was always in the bushes.
man are you desperate!
Wow. Gawker spoke to a single unnamed source and ran with it. Real Rolling Stone stuff there. The same unbiased site that suggested climate change deniers should be imprisoned:
http://gawker.com/arrest-climate-change-deniers-1553719888
Wanna talk about Hoax News? Andrew Phelps, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, stated "Half of people think Gawker is diluting its high-quality material with Chinese goats; the other half think Gawker should stick to Chinese goats and stop trying to do real journalism."
Gawker is a fucking BLOG, not a serious journalistic enterprise. They're a "How wonderful is Kim Kardashian's ass" kind of blog. Not to be taken seriously. And this entire story is what...third-hand information? From an ILLEGAL leak through an unnamed forensic examiner about what an underage girl said to him regarding what she may or may not have seen...not to mention how she may have interpreted it? Are you shitting me?
Tell us, Guesser...just what exactly is 'dragging someone down a staircase by her neck'? How exactly does one do that? And if he was doing it (if possible), WHY was he doing it? Was he trying to harm her? Was she hysterical, out of control, trying to hurt herself or someone else?
Talk about Hoax News. This is a fucking joke, and so are gawker and Guesser.
why do some people care so little about how much the president lies, even when his lies adversely impact 10's of millions of Americans, but go into a rage if they think an opinionated talk show host is lying
it's all so damn surreal
only one plausible explanation, "libtarded"
it's all so damn surreal
only one plausible explanation, "libtarded"
