OK, I don't even have to take pomy off ignore to see his reply was pure unadulterated denial. It's mind boggling that people take this route when cornered. The only person fooled has to be themselves. I suppose that's the actual point, saving face, even if it is by using such obvious denial of the facts in front of said face.
It's not like BillO wouldn't have had a huge campaign to rebut the Rolling Stone article. I don't suppose the incredible lengths BillO has gone to to explain the Levitt Town lie is any indication he might want to counter the facts on the
Buenos Aires er ah Falklands
lie story. Nah, wouldn't be within his character.
Of course such facts as how long you worked for CBS and how long you stayed in Buenos Aries couldn't be that difficult to corroborate. I imagine BillO would prefer not calling attention to the fact he never set foot in the Falklands in 82. It hasn't really been made an issue so far even with people noticing he stretched the combat thing. Must have been hard for people to imagine that not only was BillO making up the, "I've been in combat", but that he was actually making up
all of it, not just implying his role as an observer was more than that.
So, just to make it clear the info on BillO about spending a very brief time in Buenos Aries, Argentina and never setting one foot on the Falklands Islands during the war there in 1982 is indeed a fact, here are a number of additional corroborating sources.
Bill O'Reilly (commentator)
WP
In 1982, he was promoted to the network as a CBS News correspondent and covered the wars in El Salvador and the Falkland Islands from his base in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He later left CBS over a dispute concerning the uncredited use in a report by Bob Schieffer of riot footage shot by O'Reilly's crew in Buenos Aires during the Falklands conflict. (A 1998 novel by O'Reilly, Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder, depicts a television reporter who has a similar dispute over a Falklands War report. The character proceeds to exact his revenge on network staff in a series of graphically-described murders.)[10]
Source: # 10 The New Yorker
Here's the New Yorker article:
Fear Factor - Bill O’Reilly’s baroque period; by Nicholas Lemann March 27, 2006
O’Reilly’s account of what went wrong at CBS has him, as always, pissing off powerful people because he won’t play their phony games. The key moment seems to have come when, during the Falkland Islands War, O’Reilly and his crew got some exclusive footage of a riot in the streets of Buenos Aires and it wound up being incorporated into a report from the veteran correspondent Bob Schieffer, which failed to mention O’Reilly’s contribution. O’Reilly was furious, and after that, by his account, he was in career Siberia at CBS....
Then there is a biography on BillO.
NYT Sunday Book Review
...In “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up,” Marvin Kitman, a veteran television critic for Newsday, seeks to explain O’Reilly’s astonishing ascent. Kitman, who conducted numerous interviews with O’Reilly and his relatives, friends and co-workers, has performed Boswellian prodigies of research....
...At the workplace it was somehow never O’Reilly’s fault that his abrasive style got him fired again and again. O’Reilly’s greatest crisis, Kitman reports, came during the 1982 Falkland Islands War: he was supposed to appear on the CBS Evening News, which would be “validation for his father that he was a network foreign correspondent, that a major corporation was wise enough to have faith in him.” Instead, the CBS star Bob Schieffer cut him out of the story. (In his 1998 suspense novel, “Those Who Trespass,” O’Reilly concocted a character resembling Schieffer, who is brutally murdered.)
And regarding Kitman's objectivity:
Criticism of Bill O'Reilly
WP
Marvin Kitman and his O'Reilly biography
In January 2007, St. Martin's Press released a biography The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly, written by longtime Newsday TV critic Marvin Kitman. O'Reilly initially cooperated with the author by giving him 29 interviews. According to Kitman, O'Reilly was going to help promote and publicize the book until, just prior to publication, they had a disagreement over the inclusion of a chapter covering Andrea Mackris' 2004 sexual harassment lawsuit against O'Reilly.[47] After the book came out with the chapter included, Kitman asserts that O'Reilly, instead of promoting the book, attempted to bury it by "intimidating" and "terrorizing" Fox News reporters to keep them from giving Kitman interviews.[48]
In an interview with Olbermann, Kitman criticized O'Reilly as "kind of a hypocrite" by pointing out O'Reilly's belief that journalists should not attempt to flatter or indulge the people they cover. "Throughout all my interviews," Kitman said, "[O'Reilly] was telling me that nobody could ever tell him what question to ask, or what to say." However, when the subject was O'Reilly himself, Kitman said that "it turned out that he‘s not so much in favor of telling it like it is, but like it isn‘t".[48] Kitman also said he found it strange that O'Reilly sought to suppress the book when it cast him in a generally positive light. When speaking to Olbermann, Kitman said, "This is the only book that‘s ever said anything positive about Bill, except for the six he wrote about himself."[48] Several critics agree that the book's portrayal is fair.[49][50]
Sources:
# 47 Lovece, Frank. "O'Reilly bio may surprise fans and foes", Newsday.com, January 18, 2007. Retrieved on June 22, 2007. Accessed via Google cache
# 48 a b c
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17419934/
# 49
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6396133.html
# 50
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6387979.html
And there's this source:
NNDB
Bill O'Reilly worked as a school teacher, a local news reporter and eventually as a local anchorman, working his way up to CBS News in 1982. He quit almost immediately, when he thought Bob Schieffer had stolen a story he was working on.