Bill O'Reilly and the Falklands War

crescent

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crescent
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After the Brian Williams kerfluffle, I am surprised no one had brought up Bill O'Reilly's spat with David Corn and Mother Jones

Bill O'Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem

In a 2004 column about US soldiers fighting in Iraq, O'Reilly noted, "Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash."

In 2008, he took a shot at journalist Bill Moyers, saying, "I missed Moyers in the war zones of [the] Falkland conflict in Argentina, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. I looked for Bill, but I didn't see him."
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As the article points out, what O'Reilly could not have seen the things he claims to have seen in Argentina, because the things he described never actually happened.

O'Reilly hit back at Mother Jones, so MJ tore that apart as well.

The Proofiness of Bill O'Reilly

After nearly a day of hurling invective, O'Reilly opened his cable show Friday night with a monologue that assailed me as a smear-meister. But he also tried to win the day by producing documents that, he asserted, showed how he had been unfairly tarred. "In what I consider to be a miracle," he declared, "I found this CBS internal memo from 33 years ago praising my coverage" of a protest in Buenos Aires that happened just as the 1982 Falklands war ended.

Our article had pointed out that O'Reilly's later accounts of this protest—which he called a "combat situation"—contained significant contradictions with the factual record. He has claimed that soldiers fired into the crowd, that "many" people were killed, and that "I was out there pretty much by myself because the other CBS correspondents were hiding in the hotel." (The Mother Jones article said nothing about how O'Reilly covered the protest at the time.)
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This is not at the level of inaccuracy that Brian Williams put forth, but for such a well known and high level news personality, it is still of interest.
 
Sounds like nitpicking and is not in the same vein as the lies that Williams reported.

Here the article at MJ says that a reporter was wounded in the leg by gunfire:
Dispatches on the protest filed by reporters from the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and UPI note that thousands did take to the street, setting fires, breaking store windows, and that riot police did battle with protesters who threw rocks and sticks. They say tear gas was deployed; police clubbed people with nightsticks and fired rubber bullets; reporters were assaulted by demonstrators and by police; and a photojournalist was wounded in the legs by gunfire. But these media accounts did not report, as O'Reilly claims, that there were fatalities.
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But here they say
But here's the tell: As O'Reilly read from the Times story, when he reached the line about a cop "firing five shots," he omitted the rest of the sentence: "over the heads of the fleeing demonstrators." He jumped straight to the next sentence, hoodwinking the audience, for with this selective quotation, he had conveyed the impression that at least one cop had been firing on the protesters. He had adulterated his supposed proof.
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You can't have both, either someone fired shots or they didn't. They admit a photojournalist was indeed shot. Hmmm.

It sounds like both sides are cherry-picking their information and that this isn't much of a smoking gun, and is a lot closer to the truth than Willson's stories.
 
mgidm86 said:
It sounds like both sides are cherry-picking their information and that this isn't much of a smoking gun, and is a lot closer to the truth than Willson's stories.
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Both the Williams and the O'Reilly messes are overblown silliness. Williams exaggerated his story, after telling it more clearly and honestly several times before. O'Reilly exaggerated his by calling it "combat experience" knowing full well nobody thinks of a rally in the streets that turns violent as police takeover as "combat".

I have a hard time understanding why anyone would care about either (as may be evident by my previous post). Neither was under oath, neither was reporting on an important current event and intentionally misled his viewers. Both were simply talking about past experiences - why should I give a damn if they embellish a little?
 
I think a difference is that Williams is a news anchor and editor, while O'Reilly is a political commentator: which I gather means someone who gives their opinions on politics. So the former is held to a higher standard.
 
madurobob said:
Both the Williams and the O'Reilly messes are overblown silliness. Williams exaggerated his story, after telling it more clearly and honestly several times before. O'Reilly exaggerated his by calling it "combat experience" knowing full well nobody thinks of a rally in the streets that turns violent as police takeover as "combat".

I have a hard time understanding why anyone would care about either (as may be evident by my previous post). Neither was under oath, neither was reporting on an important current event and intentionally misled his viewers. Both were simply talking about past experiences - why should I give a damn if they embellish a little?
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^ Yup, that about sums it up. People embellish stories all the time, especially when trying to be entertaining. Hell, I remember this guy, George. I think his last name was Costanza. I remember him telling some women that he was an architect and drove around in Jon Voight's old car. Neither of those things were completely true.

Denver said:
I think a difference is that Williams is a news anchor and editor, while O'Reilly is a political commentator: which I gather means someone who gives their opinions on politics. So the former is held to a higher standard.
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Sounds like hogwash to me. People, outside of stand-up comedians and fishermen, are expected to tell the truth. It's no more acceptable for one to lie than the other.
 
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I'd love to see him talk about being in a 'combat situation in Argentina' to someone like Simon Weston. I think he'd rapidly find himself in a real combat situation, sat on his backside with a bleeding nose!
 
O'Reilly's dispute is not with David Corn. It's with reality. The reason these things blow up is that it's generally not a good thing to have the entertainers who pretend to be journalists in your elite media be habitual and uncontrollable fantasists. And in the case of O'Reilly, when his (let's be polite and call his lies...) perceptions include trashing his former colleagues by claiming that they were hiding in their hotel rooms, those people can reasonably be expected to issue loud public rebuttals.

If I thought this story was a tempest in a teapot, I wouldn't bother to come into the thread to comment.
 
Denver said:
I think a difference is that Williams is a news anchor and editor, while O'Reilly is a political commentator: which I gather means someone who gives their opinions on politics. So the former is held to a higher standard.
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Well.... maybe, kinda, sorta? All those bobble-headed bimbos on Fox are news anchors, too..
 
What Bill O'Reilly and Brian Williams did wrong, in journalistic terms, was that they made themselves the story. But really, the news is not what happened to Brian Williams in a helicopter, or what Bill O'Reilly did in Argentina, or what either of them had for breakfast.
 
Denver said:
I think a difference is that Williams is a news anchor and editor, while O'Reilly is a political commentator: which I gather means someone who gives their opinions on politics. So the former is held to a higher standard.
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:confused: Saying you saw combat in El Salvador and the Falklands has nothing to do with opinions on politics. He's stating it as if it's fact. That fact that he's political commentator doesn't give him a free pass to lie.

Steve S
 
This is the man who claimed to have demonstrated corage by covering wars from New York with his pen. Why would anybody take anything he says seriously?
 
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