This must be an unfamiliar position for Bill O'Reilly. He has a little problem of having his own accounts of his combat reporting courage not looking very similar to the reports of
multiple other people who were on the scene in Argentina ... and he can't shout everyone down. It's funny, but when the people O'Reilly is disagreeing with are trained media professionals who don't have to go on his show as their only way of making their case, he doesn't get to win arguments in his usual manner. Not to say O'Reilly isn't trying, by yelling
about the growing number of people stepping up to point out giant gaping holes in his story, but it's not as effective when he can't just shut off their microphones directly.
Take this CNN interview with Eric Engberg, who was in Argentina in 1982 covering the same protest O'Reilly has gotten so much mileage out of over the years. O'Reilly has liked to say things like "I was out there pretty much by myself because the other CBS News correspondents were hiding in the hotel." But Engberg, along with several other people who were there at the time, says that's just not true: "What he just said is a fabrication. A lie. There were five CBS News correspondents, including him, assigned to that bureau. ... Nobody stayed in their hotel room because they were afraid." O'Reilly's implication has been that he was sent in specially because no one else would do it, but the reality seems to be that it was an all-hands-on-deck situation, and he was toward the bottom of the pecking order.
And however many CBS reporters were out in the streets that night, wherever O'Reilly was in the pecking order, there's no question that his version of events is as different from everyone else's version as, well, a combat situation is from a "moderate-sized riot," as Engberg describes it, going on to say "I saw more violence in anti-war demonstrations in DC than I saw in Argentina that night."
O'Reilly's story hinges on fatalities—none were reported in American media at the time. His story requires him to have had bravery in the face of a reasonable fear for his own life, but other reporters who were there at the time say there was no need to fear. His story requires shots fired, but he cuts off the part of the sentence where it was "five shots over the heads of fleeing demonstrators." O'Reilly isn't just misrepresenting his own role in a set of events, in other words. He's misrepresenting the basic facts of what happened to paint his very presence there as special and brave, layering one set of lies on top of another.
And now he's trying to brazen his way out. Which he'll probably succeed at, given how little his bosses are invested in the truth.