Bill O'Reilly Exaggerated War Reporting? After Criticizing NBC, truth about O'Reilly Unveiled
BILL O’REILLY HAS PROBLEMS SIMILAR TO BRIAN WILLIAMS
BGP comment: Our thanks and credit goes to Mother Jones for this story, and the research that went into it by Sam Brodney, written by David Corn and Daniel Schulman. This story about the story was also printed by Huffington. Bill O’Reilly has preached that “Reporting comes with a big responsibility” and has been “quick on the draw” to chide journalists such as Bill Moyers and Brian Williams. Then Mother Jones, “becomes the story” as it makes news reporting that Bill O’Reilly appears to have exaggerated his “war reporting exploits”.
Alas, Bill, remember this poem: “Make your words soft and sweet, for they are the words you’ll have to eat.”
EXCERPTS FROM THE STORY:
In April 2013, while discussing the Boston Marathon bombing, O'Reilly shared a heroic tale of his exploits in the Falklands war:
“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, you know, but at the same time, I'm looking around and trying to do my job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was more important.”
"Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands," says Bob Schieffer. "For us, you were a thousand miles from where the fighting was. So we had some great meals."
O'Reilly did see some action in Argentina—just not war action. He writes in The No Spin Zone that shortly after he hit Buenos Aires—where CBS News had set up a large bureau in the Sheraton hotel—thousands of Argentines took to the streets, angry at the military junta for having yielded to the Brits.
As he tells it in his book, O'Reilly, then 32 years old, raced to cover the event: "A major riot ensued and many were killed. I was right in the middle of it and nearly died of a heart attack when a soldier, standing about ten feet away, pointed his automatic weapon directly at my head." A television cameraman was trampled, journalists were banged up, and O'Reilly and others were tear gassed. "After a couple of hours of this pandemonium," he recalls, "I managed to make it back to the Sheraton with the best news footage I have ever seen. This was major violence up close and personal, and it was an important international story."
The rest of the book's section on this episode is a resentful recounting of how O'Reilly was "big-footed" when CBS used his best-ever footage in a news report that featured Schieffer, not him. "I got the hell out of Argentina fast, landed in Miami, and raised a major ruckus at the CBS offices there," O'Reilly writes. Soon he "parted company" with CBS and took an anchor/reporter job in Boston. Schieffer notes that he and other CBS reporters also covered the protest, and that per common practice, all the footage gathered that day was pooled together for the report filed by the Buenos Aires bureau.
O'Reilly's account of the protest in Buenos Aires is at odds with news reports from the time—including the report from his own bureau. The CBS Evening News that night aired about a minute of video of the protest, apparently including some of the footage that O'Reilly and his camera team had obtained. It showed angry Argentines yelling and denouncing the junta that had lost the war. The only act of violence in the spot was a man throwing a punch against the car of a Canadian news crew.
On the segment, Schieffer reported, "There were arrests throughout the day. The police threatened to use tear gas at one point. Several North American television crews were jostled… An ABC camera team's car was stoned before the crew escaped." The CBS report said nothing about people being killed. It does not match O'Reilly's dramatic characterization of the event in his book; the video on the broadcast did not depict "major violence up close and personal."
O'Reilly has frequently represented himself as a combat-hardened journalist—he has visited US troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and reported from those countries—and he has referred to his assignment in Argentina to bolster this impression. On his television show in 1999, O'Reilly responded to a letter from a retired Air Force colonel, who said he had flown 123 missions over Vietnam and who criticized O'Reilly for supporting military action in Kosovo, by citing his Falklands war days: "Hey, Colonel, did you ever have a hostile point an M-16 at your head from 10 yards away? That happened to me while I was covering the Falklands war."
In his 2013 book Keep It Pithy, he writes, "I've seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America." During his radio show on January 13, 2005, he declared, "I've been in combat. I've seen it. I've been close to it." When a caller questioned him about this, O’Reilly shot back: "I was in the middle of a couple of firefights in South and Central America." O'Reilly did not specify where these firefights occurred—in The No Spin Zone, the only South America assignment he writes about is his trip to Argentina—and then he hung up on the caller.
El Salvador: O'Reilly reported that rebels had been driven out of the hamlet by the Salvadoran military after intense fighting. However, this was not a wiped-out village of the dead. His own footage, which was recently posted by The Nation, showed residents walking about and only one or two burned-down structures. O'Reilly's CBS report gave no indication that he had experienced any combat on this assignment in El Salvador.
When O'Reilly was excoriating Brian Williams last week for telling a war-related whopper, he said of his Fox television show, "We've made some mistakes in the past but very few… We take great pains to present you with information that can be verified." He also asserted, "Reporting comes with a big responsibility, the Founding Fathers made that point very clearly. They said to us, 'We'll give you freedom. We'll protect you from government intrusion. But, in return, you, the press, must be honest.'"