Fox News honcho Bill O’Reilly backs up his credentials with war stories, much like Brian Williams and countless other journalists. Now O’Reilly’s being called out about a story he’s told about being on the ground in the Falklands during the war there in 1982: “I was in a situation one time in a war in Argentina in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete, and the army was chasing us,” O’Reilly said on air April 17, 2013, according to Mother Jones, which is investigating the story.
Mother Jones writers David Korn and Daniel Schulman point out how O’Reilly has used the story to enhance his reputation as a “guy who’s been there.” The video below shows O’Reilly dismissing veteran reporter Bill Moyers as a guy who avoided the rough situations O’Reilly willingly courted. But according to sources like CBS News’ Bob Schieffer: “Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands. I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.” (O’Reilly was with CBS at the time.) The reporters were a thousand miles away in hotels in Buenos Aires. O’Reilly’s response is that he was describing action in Buenos Aires, not the Falklands.”I never said I was on the Falkland Islands,” he says.
