Showing posts with label falkland islands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label falkland islands. Show all posts

Friday, February 27, 2015

The Further Fictional Adventures of Bill O'Reilly

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Previous Related Posts:
Falklands Drama: Cornered Narcissist Bill O'Reilly Lashes Out

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As the media casts a spotlight on his fake journalistic endeavors, Bill O'Reilly is becoming more and more unhinged. Last week he threatened to send David Corn of Mother Jones to a "Kill Zone," and this week he made threats against a writer for the New York Times.

He's a classic loud-mouth bully who can dish it out but can't take it, thin-skinned and violent. And why is he so defensive? Because he has been caught lying over and over again and there's no way out.

From New York Times
Mr. O’Reilly’s efforts to refute the claims by Mother Jones and some former CBS News colleagues occurred both on the air and off on Monday. 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.”






"(O'Reilly is) the biggest Kahuna in all of cable news - a man who at any other news network would be in a fight for his professional life right now, but so far for him apparently no consequences."
~ Rachel Maddow






Statement from Fox News:

photo BillOReilly-Lies.png

But reporters are not backing down. If anything, they are digging deeper into O'Reilly's mountain of lies.

The Guardian is investigating O'Reilly's coverage of the Los Angeles Riots in the 1990s when he worked for Inside Edition.

From Talking Points Memo
Six former co-workers disputed O'Reilly's tale of being bombarded with concrete and bricks by rioters while covering the 1992 unrest in Los Angeles, according to the Guardian.

“They were throwing bricks and stones at us,” O’Reilly told an online interviewer in 2006, according to the Guardian.
“Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time," O'Reilly added.
O'Reilly repeated the story to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt this month.
“We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us,” he told Hewitt, the Guardian reported.

“It didn’t happen,” one colleague from "Inside Edition" told the paper. “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”

. . .

Hunter Walker of Business Insider points out that O'Reilly's "heroic" version of himself in Buenos Aires saving a cameraman in a combat zone during the Falklands War was included in a novel written by O'Reilly called "Those Who Trespass." When Art Imitates Ego! However, it is mostly fiction:

From Business Insider
In O'Reilly's novel the protest was broken up by soldiers, or as the author put it, "combat-ready shock troops dressed in full battle gear and armed with machine guns." At this point, Michaels, one of the characters described as O'Reilly's fictional "alter ego" realized he "had to get away" with his cameraman and soundman. As Michaels and his crew escaped, the soldiers let loose on the crowd.
"Without warning, they began firing directly into the crowd," O'Reilly wrote, adding, "Hundreds of people immediately fell onto the cement."
O'Reilly wrote that Michaels "saw one man take a bullet squarely in the right eye" and he "was killed instantly." He described "ten thousand tightly packed demonstrators ... desperately trying to get away from the gunfire any way they could."
These scenes written by O'Reilly contradict contemporaneous reports of the real-life protest, which do not describe widespread gunfire or any deaths.

In another book, O'Reilly claimed that he saw some war action in Northern Ireland and El Salvador in addition to Buenos Aires, but under scrutiny he is backing off.

From Washington Post
In his 2013 book, “Keep It Pithy,” the Fox News host recounted,“I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”

On another occasion, he said, “I’ve covered four wars,” and ticked off El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, the 1982 Falklands conflict, Northern Ireland and an unspecified conflict in Israel. “I’ve seen the best and the worst.”
. . . O’Reilly traveled to Northern Ireland in 1984 to research a book about the Troubles, according to Fox News. The book was never finished, and it’s not clear whether he covered the conflict for any news organization. At the time, he was working for a Boston TV station, WCVB, but his then-boss, Philip S. Balboni, said that O’Reilly covered only local news and did commentary for the station.
O’Reilly didn’t mention seeing any terrorist bombings in Northern Ireland during a radio interview with syndicated host Hugh Hewitt last week. Instead, he told a milder story: “We went on a raid in Divis Flats with the police. And it was a pretty intense situation. There was stuff being thrown, arrests being made, all of that.”
“Were you in fear of physical harm?” Hewitt asked.
No, O’Reilly replied.

O'Reilly also tried to use photographic evidence to "prove" that he saw nuns being shot in El Salvador. He doesn't seem to understand the difference between "seeing" a picture of something and "seeing" something in person, yet he always uses first person when he talks.

From Talking Points Memo
“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered," he told Mediaite.

During a Dec. 14, 2012 episode of "The O'Reilly Factor," O'Reilly talked about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He compared it to something he said he'd seen earlier in his career.

"I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head," O'Reilly said, according to Media Matters.

He explained to Mediaite on Wednesday that he brought up El Salvador while discussing the Sandy Hook shooting to talk about "evil."

"I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil," O'Reilly told the website. "That’s what I am referring to when I say ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ No one could possibly take that segment as reporting on El Salvador.”

Media Matters also pointed to a Sept. 27, 2005 episode of O'Reilly's radio show in which he said, "I've seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador."


Media Matters also found a good example of O'Reilly claiming that he covered a dramatic story in person when actually he was several states away at a TV station.

George de Mohrenschildt was a Russian emigre who befriended Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and testified before the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. On March 29, 1977, the same day he was contacted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he committed suicide at his daughter's home in Florida. At the time, O'Reilly was a reporter for Dallas' WFAA-TV who regularly reported on stories related to the Kennedy assassination.
O'Reilly has bizarrely inserted himself into de Mohrenschildt's story, claiming in books and on Fox News that he was outside the house seeking to interview de Mohrenschiltd at the time of his death.

. . . In his 2012 best-selling non-fiction book Killing Kennedy, O'Reilly writes on page 300 that as a "reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt's daughter's home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian ... that reporter's name is Bill O'Reilly."

. . . "Bill O'Reilly's a phony, there's no other way to put it," said Tracy Rowlett, a former WFAA reporter and anchor who worked at the station with O'Reilly. "He was not up on the porch when he heard the gunshots, he was in Dallas. He wasn't traveling at that time."
Byron Harris, a reporter at WFAA for the past 40 years, agreed that O'Reilly had not traveled to Florida for the story and accused him of stealing his reporting on de Mohrenschildt's suicide from a newspaper.
According to Harris, O'Reilly "was in Dallas. He stole that article out of the newspaper. I guarantee Channel 8 didn't send him to Florida to do that story because it was a newspaper story, it was broken by the Dallas Morning News."











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Monday, February 23, 2015

Falklands Drama ~ Cornered Narcissist Bill O'Reilly Lashes Out

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Previous Related Posts:
Bill O'Reilly on 50s America: "Unified" and "Innocent" like Mickey Mouse Club
Bill O'Reilly White-Old-Man-Splains Asians

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Recently, talking-head Brian Williams of NBC News was suspended for six months after embellishing past journalistic experiences.

After it happened, Fox News and Bill O'Reilly were quick to gloat about how Williams was a symptom of the Left-Wing Liberal Media they love to hate.

From Mediaite
O’Reilly spoke of how the Founders believed in a free and honest press and bemoaned how the current American press isn’t “half as responsible as the men who forged the nation.”
But O’Reilly didn’t just go after Williams, he said this is about a culture of deception in the liberal media. They need to, he said, “stop the corruption and begin telling the truth without an agenda,” otherwise the public’s trust in them will continue to plummet.
. . . he ended by telling his viewers, “Think about other news agencies that are distorting the facts.”

But it turns out, Bill O has been spinning lies for some time about his reporting in Argentina during the War in the Falklands, making it sound as if he was in the midst of combat when he never even set foot on the islands. At the time, he was covering the remote war for CBS News, a fact he has written about in his best-selling books and discussed on his show many times, saying he was in "fire fights" and "war zones" in Argentina.

But neither he nor any of his CBS colleagues were in the Falklands because the Argentine government wouldn't allow them there.

An article in Mother Jones magazine is calling out O'Reilly for his lies.

Read the Original Article:
Mother Jones: Bill O'Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem with the Falklands War






Here's just one quote from O'Reilly about the Falklands Via Media Matters

O'REILLY: I -- I was in a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, OK?

KEVIN: Mm-hmm.

O'REILLY: And I can tell you when the Kool-Aid hits the fan, OK, nobody is locking in on anybody else. Nobody.

KEVIN: And you're right.

O'REILLY: OK, ad --

KEVIN: I know (inaudible; overlapping dialogue)

O'REILLY: -- adrenaline -- adrenaline surges and you veterans out there listening right now, you know exactly what I'm talking about here. Adrenaline surges, your senses become very attune, much sharper than they are ordinarily, and you are locked in, focused in, on your survival and achieving the means of staying alive.


From Mother Jones, the Day After
O'Reilly responded to the story by launching a slew of personal invective. He did not respond to the details of the story. Instead, he called me a "liar," a "left-wing assassin," and a "despicable guttersnipe." He said that I deserve "to be in the kill zone." (You can read one of my responses here.) And in his show-opening "Talking Points memo" monologue on Friday evening, he continued the name-calling.
In a way, it's impossible to win a debate with O'Reilly because he is not bound by reality. In response to the article, he told Fox News' media reporter, Howard Kurtz, "Nobody was on the Falklands and I never said I was on the island, ever." Yet our article included video of O'Reilly saying in 2013, "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." Note the words "war zone" and "in the Falklands."

UPDATE: CBS News has released their Falklands Coverage:



As Mother Jones points out, this video doesn't support O'Reilly's claims:

. . . rather than bolstering O'Reilly's description of the anti-government protest he says he covered as a "combat situation," the tape corroborates the accounts of other journalists who were there and who have described it as simply a chaotic, violent protest.

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Other correspondents with CBS who were in Buenos Aires with O'Reilly refuted his claims, only to be slammed by Bill-O.

From CNN
Eric Engberg, a CBS correspondent who was also in Buenos Aires at the time, defended Corn in a Facebook post on Friday and said, "It was not a war zone or even close. It was an 'expense account zone.'"
Longtime NBC News correspondent George Lewis, who was also there at the time, agreed with Engberg, writing on Facebook, "Cushiest war I ever covered."
Did O'Reilly's photographer get "run down" and bloodied?
CNN has interviewed seven people who were there for CBS, and none of them recall anyone from the network being injured.
"If somebody got hurt, we all would have known," Alvarez said.
. . . O'Reilly has repeatedly defended his claims, including on Fox News on Sunday morning. "I don't know if he was there," O'Reilly said, implying that Engberg may not have witnessed the riot. He called Engberg "Room Service Eric," alleging he often stayed in his hotel during unfolding news events.

Eric Engberg pushed back in an interview with Huff Post



(My transcript)

Eric Engberg: He's completely nutty. There were five correspondents working that story for CBS. Four of them had been on that remote site for weeks because the Argentine government would not allow us to go to the Falkland Islands. We were hoping we could get in, but when we couldn't we had to stay in Buenos Aires and file stories... When the riot happened, and actually it was a slow-developing riot - O'Reilly has said in one of his books that the "crowd stormed the Presidential Palace." That is not what happened. What happened was the stupid government of Argentina, which was run by a collection - a junta - of murderous generals - they announced that they were going to hold a speech that evening at the Presidential Palace and that the public should come and watch the speech.

In the meantime, the British released the information about how the Argentines surrendered. And as people learned of the fact that the war was over, and that they had lost, they became increasingly angry and more and more of them started coming to the palace. So you had a large assembly of people, 4 or 5 thousand, who were angry at the government. I was one of those who was there. The other three correspondents were there. I frankly don't know where O'Reilly was. But the people who were there for our company will assert that 'yes, Engberg was there with his camera crew.' Does anybody believe that a reporter who is covering a war from 1200 miles away, hearing that there was a riot at the National Palace, would sit in his hotel room?

Engberg: It's ludicrous. It's nutty - He's Nutty! ... Nutty about me - he says I was hiding in my hotel room, which is another one of those classic O'Reilly responses to any kind of criticism of him. It's always to fire back some personal slur at whoever made the criticism, instead of to respond to the criticism.

Next, Bill O'Reilly attacked Bob Schieffer, veteran journalist and moderator of the Sunday news show, Face the Nation, accusing him of stealing and plagiarizing his stories in Argentina. Yeah, that's really going to turn out well . . .

From a Fox interview with Howard Kurtz, Via Crooks and Liars
BillO then blasted CBS's Bob Schieffer for "big footing" his story which happens all the time in the news business.

O'Reilly: If you write an article and send it in and another reporter put there name on the article, what's that called? it begins with a "p."

 Kurtz: I've always called it "big footing" and you're not happy if that happens.

 O'Reilly: What is it called in print? it begins with a "p."

 Kurtz: I'll let you tell me.

 O'Reilly: Plagiarism.

Kurtz: Oh, if it's your colleague and you're working together
O'Reilly:I wasn't working together with these guys.

Hmmm, but he WAS working with both Engberg and Schieffer, because they all worked for CBS News.His lying knows no bounds.






















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