As the revelations about the various things Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has lied about continue to pile up, it is no great surprise that Bill himself considers it nothing more than a conspiracy against him. It also seems perfectly in character for his employer, Fox News, to not give a damn about his various fabrications because let's be honest, a Fox News host who's not embellishing the facts around him is not doing their one and only prescribed job. Still, though, the breadth of O'Reilly's steadfastly self-promotional lies would be hard for any organization that
did care about credibility to ignore.
They all have the same pattern: Bill O'Reilly claims he witnessed events he did not witness or did some act of reportorial heroism that he did not do. (And the people he worked for and with during each event have been very forthcoming in producing evidence that he did not do those things, possibly because almost everyone Bill O'Reilly has ever worked with seems to hate his guts.) A short list:
- In his book, Killing Kennedy, and on Fox News, O'Reilly claimed to have been on the front porch of an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald when he heard a gunshot inside, the sound of the man killing himself. Not only was he not on the porch, he wasn't even in the same state; a recording has surfaced of O'Reilly planning the trip after he was told of the suicide by a government investigator. His publisher dismisses the error as unimportant, and Fox News has of yet remained similarly unconcerned.
More lies below the fold, of course.
- O'Reilly has repeatedly claimed he was in a "war zone" during the Falkland Island conflict between Britain and Argentina. He wasn't—he was in Buenos Aires covering an anti-government protest. He nonetheless asserts he witnessed soldiers "gunning down" civilians and bravely saved his own cameraman from those soldiers; his own footage at the time shows nothing of the sort, nor even mentions it.
- He wrote in another book he'd "seen Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs." Fox News actually felt the need to respond to this one, which they did by explaining that "O’Reilly was not an eyewitness to any bombings or injuries in Northern Ireland. Instead, he was shown photos of bombings by Protestant police officers." Append a similar disclaimer when he said he "saw nuns get shot in the back of the head" in El Salvador.
- And then there's his tale of heroism during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which he tells as braving camera-smashing rioters while "concrete was raining down on us." His version is disputed by a half-dozen of his former colleagues, two of whom have a much more Bill-O'Reilly-sounding version of events, in which he was accosted by an on-scene resident who:
was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighbourhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”
Covering the L.A. riots while riding around in a limousine is, in fact, the most Bill O'Reilly thing I've ever heard.
So what's the pattern here? Self-aggrandizement, in every case. Coming on the heels of news anchor Brian Williams' long network suspension for embellishing a tale of the time his helicopter came under fire, it's impossible to not compare the two. The difference, of course, is that anyone who has ever watched Bill O'Reilly's show was already perfectly aware that the man has only a tenuous grip on the reality the rest of us inhabit. He is a man who considers the difference between Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to be a signal of cultural armageddon. It's not terribly surprising that he sees himself as surrounded by dangers and chaos that not a single one of his contemporaries were able to notice, or that he sees himself as bearing witness to important historical moments in a manner far more extravagant than what others have seen.
People looking for any of this to discredit Fox News opinion-haver Bill O'Reilly, however, presume that there is something left there to discredit. There's not. At no point has O'Reilly dazzled his viewers with hard-hitting facts or astute observations. The point of the show throughout its history has been to be a tabloidesque Inside Edition without the hard work of having to document the stories Bill tells. If he says there is a War on Christmas, that is all the "proof" that will be given. If he says this or that Fox News demographic is now in the dangerous Obama's crosshairs, that demographic will obligingly wet their pants on his command. The whole show has been fiction, of course, and people are just noticing now because it's getting increasingly implausible to pretend that Fox News can be compared to any other major "news" outlet.
The reason Fox News host Bill O'Reilly is not being reprimanded for his pattern of flagrant personal lies is because Bill O'Reilly works for a network that is unconcerned with patterns of flagrant personal lies. It is no more complex than that. It is a world in which tax-dodging ranchers can be patriots, and where government plots against your personal religion are commonplace, and where gays and Muslim-Americans threaten to dominate the straight Christian majority, and in which refugee children represent an imminent security threat, and if Bill O'Reilly has to lie his ass off to promote any of those very important fictions or his prominent role in bringing them to you, then that's what he'll do.
No, I don't want Fox News to discipline Bill O'Reilly for a career-spanning pattern of now-documented falsehoods. I want them to embrace him, and own him. There is no purpose in feigning an interest in integrity at this point; that ship has long since sailed. Yes, we are the network of liars, you can almost hear the spokesmen sneer—what of it?