Mother Jones Blows the Whistle on Bill O’Reilly’s Numerous “War Zone” Lies
As David Corn and Daniel Schulman report, Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem — and it makes Williams look like a piker when it comes to lying about war zone experiences. Because nobody denies that Williams was actually there in Iraq, but O’Reilly apparently made up entire stories about being in combat zones that were completely untrue.
Just go read it; the lies are exhaustively documented. But I’ll go out on a limb and predict Fox News will do absolutely nothing about it.
Bill O’Reilly: Mother Jones Report ‘Garbage’
Bill O’Reilly says a new Mother Jones report alleging that the Fox News host made false claims about his Falklands War experience is “a piece of garbage” and that its principal author, David Corn, is “a liar.”
In a telephone interview with the On Media blog, O’Reilly called Corn a “despicable guttersnipe” who has been trying to take him down “for years.”
“It’s a hit piece,” O’Reilly said. “Everything I said about what I reported in South and Central America is true. Everything.”
[…]
“I was not on the Falkland Islands and I never said I was. I was in Buenos Aires… In Buenos Aires we were in a combat situation after the Argentines surrendered.”
As he writes in The No Spin Zone, O’Reilly was in Buenos Aires when thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest the military junta for surrendering to the Brits. O’Reilly says that the Army shot into the crowd. (Corn and his colleague Daniel Schulman say this was not war action.)
“It was clear that I did not say I was in the Falkland Islands. I’ve done myriad interviews over the years and I never said that,” O’Reilly told On Media.
“Yesterday I checked in with [Fox News spokesperson] Dana Klinghoffer, and said, ‘if I have questions about a personality is it best to direct them to you?’ She said yes. So this morning at 8:30 I sent them a detailed list of questions — a dozen or more questions — with all the individual quotes and citations that the piece reports. I asked them to explain O’Reilly’s comments and to explain contradictions between what he said and the public record. And, to make things easier for Fox News, I added links wherever possible,” Corn said.
“I presented all these quotes and assertions that he made at 8:30 a.m. Then I started calling at 9 a.m. to make sure my email had been received,” Corn continued. “I called Dana about four times today, left voicemails, and sent her two follow-up emails, asking that she get back to me by 3 p.m. That would give them most of the day to respond, which seemed fair and balanced to me.”
“When I had nothing from Dana, I sent [Fox News Executive Vice President] Bill Shine an email alerting him that I’d sent this email to Dana and even said that if they needed more time, I would try to accomodate them. I never heard back from Bill and I never heard back from Dana —- so at about 5:30, I published the piece.”
Corn said that O’Reilly’s refusal to comment ahead of publication demonstrated that he would rather hide behind name calling than address the allegations in his report.
“Rather than calling anyone a liar or a guttersnipe, he had ample opportunity to deal with the facts of this case. He elected not to, and instead engaged in name calling,” Corn said. “He chose not to address the issue, he chose to throw mud. And I would say that his right to impugn others ought to be diminished until he answers the basic questions about his statements.”