Longtime controversial Fox News host Bill O'Reilly is claiming a report about his Falklands War coverage is bogus, calling it "garbage," and claiming the author making the allegation is a liar.
O'Reilly's intense rebuke regarding his reporting in South and Central America during the war from comes on the heels of another well-known news name, Brian Williams, being sanctioned by NBC News for false statements regarding Williams' coverage of the Iraq invasion. Williams was taken off the highly-acclaimed news show for six months and fined half his annual salary.
According to Mother Jones writer David Corn, O'Reilly did not state the true facts about being in a war zone during his reporting coverage. The allegations, published Thursday, center on O'Reilly's location during his reporting. O'Reilly says he never claimed to actually be in "an active war zone" during the Falklands during the England-Argentina conflict in 1982. Corn contends O'Reilly has made that contention in a book and on his Fox News broadcast.
O'Reilly says Corn's report is bogus and that the Washington bureau chief of the magazine, who is also a MSNBC contributor, "is a liar, a smear merchant, and will do anything he can to injure me and the network. Everybody knows that. Everything I've reported about my journalistic career is true."
Corn lists out seven examples where O'Reilly allegedly reports being in a war zone while serving as a CBS news reporter at the time. Corn says neither O'Reilly nor Fox News responded to requests for comment on the report.
O'Reilly responded with a volley of verbal fist throws after the Mother Jones article appeared, stating on various media outlets that "I was not on the Falkland Islands and I never said I was."
As Tech Times reported earlier this month NBC News anchor Brian Williams came under similar scrutiny for reporting accuracy, and ultimately was suspended following reports that he concocted various scenarios regarding some of his past reporting stints, including being under fire with troops in the Iraq war. Williams also claimed to have been embedded with a Navy Seal unit. His statements came under fire after a military officer who was at the same invasion scene as Williams described stated the anchor's recollections as not true. Williams ultimately issued an apology, which then also came under scrutiny and debate, and was taken off the news show for six months.
