With NBC News' Brian Williams on a 6 month suspension, the hypocrisy one hears from other so-called journalists is stunning. Moreover, if Williams' suspension is justified - I personally don't believe it is - then that same standard needs to be applied across the broadcast spectrum. If that occurred, of course, every anchor and reporter at Fox News would need to be suspended immediately given the way in which they lie with abandon and rewrite facts and events. One of the top blowhards at Fox is Bill O'Reilly. As Salon reports based on an investigation done by Mother Jones, O'Reilly has lied about his war correspondence experiences for years. Here are excerpts:
NBC News anchor Brian Williams is no longer the only prominent anchor who faces serious credibility questions for misleading the public about his experiences in war zones. In an extensive new investigation, Mother Jones’ David Corn and Daniel Schulman detail how for decades, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has told gripping accounts of his own war reporting that don’t mesh with the facts.O’Reilly’s tall tales concern his experiences as a CBS News reporter covering the 1982 Falklands War between Great Britain and Argentina, as well as his dispatches from El Salvador’s civil war. The conservative commentator has cited his supposed wartime experiences numerous times as evidence of his journalistic gravitas, as Corn and Schulman document.O’Reilly also related a tale of his harrowing Argentine experience following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying on air: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.But Corn and Schulman find crucial inconsistencies between O’Reilly’s stories and the factual record.[H]his own account of his time in Argentina in his 2001 book, The No Spin Zone, contains no references to O’Reilly experiencing or covering any combat during the Falklands war. . . . .There is nothing in this memoir indicating that O’Reilly witnessed the fighting between British and Argentine military forces—or that he got anywhere close to the Falkland Islands, which are 300 miles off Argentina’s shore and about 1,200 miles south of Buenos Aires.Given the remote location of the war zone—which included the British territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, more than 1,400 miles offshore—few reporters were able to witness and report on the combat that claimed the lives of about 900 Argentine and British troops. The government in London only allowed about 30 British journalists to accompany its military forces.American reporters were not on the ground in this distant war zone. “Nobody got to the war zone during the Falklands war,” Susan Zirinsky, a longtime CBS News producer who helped manage the network’s coverage of the war from Buenos Aires, tells Mother Jones. She does not remember what O’Reilly did during his time in Argentina. But she notes that the military junta kept US reporters from reaching the islands: “You weren’t allowed on by the Argentinians. No CBS person got there.”Longtime CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer corroborates those accounts, telling Mother Jones, ”Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands. I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.”
There's more that is worth a read. Not surprisingly, O'Reilly has condemned NBC's suspension of Williams. That said, for all those lauding Williams' suspension, they need to be demanding O'Reilly's suspension - and the suspension of every other journalist who has embellished their experiences as Williams is said to have done. If that were to happen, I suspect that there would be few anchors left, particularly at Fox News.
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