Fox News is
sticking by its boy even as a parade of Bill O'Reilly's former CBS colleagues come forward to say that his accounts of "war zone" and "combat situation" reporting are false. The tally of O'Reilly's embellishments
keeps growing; in fact, one 2008 interview prompted one of O'Reilly's former CBS colleagues to
complain at the time that O'Reilly's version of the story didn't match with reality.
In that interview, with Martin Kalb, O'Reilly claimed that "The Argentine troops shoot the people down in the streets. They shoot them down. It's not like rubber bullets or gas, it's ... people are dying," that his cameraman was trampled and he pulled the injured man out of harm's way, and that a soldier pointed an M-16 at him. On Saturday, former CBS correspondent Eric Jon Engberg extensively rebutted O'Reilly's claims, describing a protest in which there were no casualties and a number of CBS teams were out in the streets without incident. As of Monday, there are seven people who were in Argentina for CBS who say O'Reilly's claims are false:
"Nobody remembers this happening," said Manny Alvarez, who was a cameraman for CBS News in Buenos Aires. [...]
Longtime NBC News correspondent George Lewis, who was also there at the time, agreed with Engberg, writing on Facebook, "Cushiest war I ever covered." [...]
"There were certainly no dead people," Forrest said. "Had there been dead people, they would have sent more camera crews."
As for the cameraman who was supposedly injured, the man named by O'Reilly is refusing to comment, but the CBS Miami Bureau office manager at the time says that no injury report was filed and the photographer never mentioned any such thing.
For his part, O'Reilly is firing back with predictable rage. Mother Jones' David Corn was a "guttersnipe" for publishing the original story outing O'Reilly's false claims. Then Eric Jon Engberg was "Room Service Eric, because he never left the hotel." The problem is, as person after person comes forward saying that O'Reilly's accounts both of what happened during the protest he was covering and how CBS was handling its coverage are false, the whole "that person is full of crap and I am the trustworthy one" act becomes less and less plausible. Particularly since O'Reilly's claims about the basic facts of the protest, such as that many people were killed, go against the coverage of the event at the time—and not just the CBS coverage.
But for true believers, this is all just evidence that liberals are out to get O'Reilly, and his angry denials are The Truth. Seven of his former colleagues and contemporary press reports are lying, O'Reilly is to be trust. With Fox News executives sticking by him, this shouldn't damage O'Reilly much in the fictional world where he spends most of his time.
7:45 AM PT: Defending himself to Howard Kurtz on Sunday, O'Reilly read from a New York Times account of the Buenos Aires protest that he said backed up his version of events. But the author of that piece writes on Facebook that O'Reilly wasn't exactly honest there, either:
I wrote: "Chants of 'Argentina! Argentina!' and the whine of police sirens echoed off the buildings of the business district as police trucks moved in. One large gray van pulled into an intersection a block from the plaza, and policemen emerged, seizing anyone they could. One policeman pulled a pistol, firing five shots over the heads of fleeing demonstrators."
When he read it on Howard Kurtz's Media Buzz show, O'Reilly left out that the shots were "over the heads of fleeing demonstrators." As far as I know, no demonstrators were shot or killed by police in Buenos Aires that night.