Blog | Does anyone care that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly may have pulled a Brian Williams?
Related: O’Reilly still defending self against Mother Jones report
I think even asking this question will put me in the “far left” “guttersnake” family, but I’ll pose it any way:
Would it be worse for Bill O’Reilly if he was found to have been lying/exaggerating about his war experience for years in the way the now-suspended NBC news anchor Brian Williams did, or that most people either don’t care or wouldn’t be surprised?
O’Reilly is being accused by a reporter of Mother Jones, a left-leaning outfit that brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” video that helped reshape the 2012 presidential election cycle.
As could be easily predictable, the likes of Rush Limbaugh and others say it is simply an attempt by the lamestream media to distract from Williams’ sins by saying “others do it, too.” That’s a laughable claim, but never mind. Maybe examining the facts of the Mother Jones claims against O’Reilly’s defense would be more productive?
When the Williams story finally broke, the lamestream media went into hyper-drive and began asking questions about all sorts of reporting in Williams’ past, which ultimately led to his being suspended for 6 months. NBC News said that move was vital to maintaining its credibility.
The Fox News Channel, on the other hand, has simply said it is standing by O’Reilly instead of conducting the kind of internal investigation NBC News did. Credibility seems to be secondary to an outlet that makes a lot of money, has cable TV news highest rankings and a loyal following that is ready to ignore, disbelieve or attack the network’s critics.
O’Reilly, for his part, has taken the road he frequently does, personally attacking Mother Jones and painting himself as the victim. That’s a Fox News Channel classic. The network, while constantly demeaning others in a variety of ways, has perfected the monetization of victimhood.
That seems to be the Fox News business model, be as unkind and biting as possible when discussing “enemies” - then cry foul when one of those enemies returns fire.
In the case of O’Reilly vs. Mother Jones, though, it will be interesting to see if Fox News can get rid of this story before anyone does any serious fact-checking to confirm that Mother Jones is lying - or that O’Reilly is. That alone speaks volumes.
Here’s the latest:
Ex-CBS journalist challenges O’Reilly’s story
Other parts of the Engberg post seek to advance the case that O’Reilly was a stubborn rogue, a case that needs no further corroboration. For instance, the CBS News Buenos Aires bureau chief Larry Doyle instructed the crews not to use their lights on the night of the protest, the better to avoid attracting “potentially violent people.” O’Reilly flouted the instructions, pushing his camera to use his light. “When Doyle looked at the tape shot by O’Reilly’s cameraman he saw that the video included stand-ups — on camera description by the reporter — which O’Reilly had ordered the cameraman to shoot — with his light on. Doyle was further upset by this tape, which clearly showed that his orders on lights had been unilaterally violated by O’Reilly. The issue here was safety,” writes Engberg. Anyone who’s read even a cursory biography of the King of Cable News knows that stunts just like this one vaulted O’Reilly from one TV outlet to the next over a far-flung career.
Perhaps not as far-flung as O’Reilly likes to claim, however.
For all his rips against O’Reilly, Engberg concludes that his apparent embellishments do not place him in the category of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who is currently under a six-month suspension for his distortions. “I don’t think it’s as big a lie as Brian Williams told because O’Reilly hasn’t falsely claimed to be the target of an enemy attack, but he has displayed a willingness to twist the truth in a way that seeks to invent a battlefield that did not exist,” writes Engberg.
And this is the way the media analyst at Fox News describes things:
That clearly accuses O’Reilly of telling lies on par with the false tale that prompted NBC to impose a six-month suspension on Williams, who had to apologize for claiming that he was on a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade over Iraq in 2003.
And yet the Mother Jones piece appears to turn on semantics, not some specific story that O’Reilly told about being in the Falklands. Among the examples cited:
--In a 2001 book, O’Reilly said: “I've reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands."
--In a Washington panel discussion, O’Reilly said: “I've covered wars, okay? I've been there. The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Middle East. I've almost been killed three times, okay.”
--In a 2004 column, O’Reilly wrote: “Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash."
But that reference—O’Reilly saying he was “in Argentina”--undercuts the thrust of the story, that he claimed to have covered the Falklands combat.
The same phrase, “in Argentina,” also appears in some 2013 comments by O’Reilly cited by Corn:
“I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off…”
In the interview, O’Reilly described the scene in Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the hostilities in the Falklands: “Thousands took to the streets. Hundreds of troops surrounded the presidential palace. I was in the middle of that. A reporter was shot in the legs. People were throwing rocks, bricks, some had guns.”
So the dispute comes down to O’Reilly’s shorthand use of the Falklands and the term “war zone.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2015 at 10:42 AM with the headline "Blog | Does anyone care that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly may have pulled a Brian Williams?."