Here's a follow-up related to the story covered in ericlewis0's diary on Bill O'Reilly's freakout after being exposed as a serial liar by David Corn.
Fox has a story up by Howard Kurtz, "O’Reilly denounces Mother Jones story on his war reporting".
It's every bit as ineffectual and hilariously dumb as O'Reilly's response.
Kurtz writes
And yet the Mother Jones piece appears to turn on semantics, not some specific story that O’Reilly told about being in the Falklands. Among the examples cited:
--In a 2001 book, O’Reilly said: “I've reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands."
--In a Washington panel discussion, O’Reilly said: “I've covered wars, okay? I've been there. The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Middle East. I've almost been killed three times, okay.”
--In a 2004 column, O’Reilly wrote: “Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash."
But that reference—O’Reilly saying he was “in Argentina”--undercuts the thrust of the story, that he claimed to have covered the Falklands combat.
The same phrase, “in Argentina,” also appears in some 2013 comments by O’Reilly cited by Corn:
“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…”
Can't get much more desperate than that. I mean, Kurtz seems to think that the comma separating "in Argentina" from "in the Falklands" means we won't notice the latter words. Haha!
It's not like that comma stretches for 1,200 miles, the distance between the Falkands and Buenos Aires!
.
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Doesn't Kurtz choke on that pretzel logic?
Of course, you can't really expect anything else from someone writing for an outfit that calls itself "Fox News".
Incidentally, here's the failure popping up in other corporate media outlets.
Here's USAToday's take:
It will be fascinating to see whether this contretemps has legs. O"Reilly clearly is guilty of stretching the truth. He readily concedes he wasn't in the Falklands. And street protests are a far cry from covering combat. His language was a long way from precise.
CNN has a rather spineless take on the issue, only calling O'Reilly's claim a "problem", and even there not making its own judgment, but instead citing the Mother Jones piece, where Bob Schieffer is quoted:
Corn and Schulman's report detailed several times when O'Reilly said that he had spent time in a "war zone" while covering the Falklands conflict as a reporter for CBS News.
The problem, as CBS News's chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer explained to Mother Jones, is that the only "war zone" was in and around the islands, and "nobody from CBS got to the Falklands."
Pathetic.
1:33 PM PT: Mother Jones is now demanding that O'Reilly apologize for this statement:
"I’ve talked to about eight or nine reporters, and when they verify what I’m saying, because it’s easily verifiable, then I expect David Corn to be in the kill zone. Where he deserves to be," O'Reilly told the website.