O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Reporting

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O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Reporting

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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02 ... h-of-lies/

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly had sharp words for a Thursday report alleging he misled viewers about his time covering the Falklands War.

“It’s a bunch of lies and a politically motivated hit piece,” O’Reilly told TheBlaze by phone Thursday evening, adding, “Everything I have said is absolutely 100 percent true.”

The famed Fox News host was reacting to a report in Mother Jones that claimed he was not truthful in the past when recounting his experience covering the 1982 conflict. The left-leaning publication quoted O’Reilly citing his experience covering the Falklands War as proof he had reported in “active war zones.”

“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,” O’Reilly said, for instance, during a 2013 segment on his program.

O’Reilly maintained Thursday evening that everything he said was truthful, pointing to his coverage of the war from Buenos Aires and taking a shot at David Corn, the author of the Mother Jones report.

“I never said I was in the Falkland islands — ever. I said I covered the Falkland Islands War,” he told TheBlaze. “And if that moron doesn’t think it was a war zone in Buenos Aires, then he’s even dumber than I think he is.”

O’Reilly said it was clear why Mother Jones published the report.

“Have you looked at our ratings lately? He [Corn] works for MSNBC. We’re just killing him. We are wiping them out of the universe,” the Fox News host told TheBlaze. “It’s all about ideology and money. He’s got a chance to try and tie me into Brian Williams so he throws a bunch of lies to try to make that happen.”

O’Reilly then predicted the outlet would continue going after him.

“They are far-left zealots,” he told TheBlaze. “I mean, it’s disgusting, but that’s the world I live in.”

“I’ll reiterate one more time … every single thing I have said about my reportorial career has been true,” O’Reilly said. “Everything.”

The Mother Jones report comes just a week after “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams was suspended for six months without pay for not truthfully recounting his experience covering the Iraq War.

Bill at his best:
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

Post by Danzig in the Dark »

Buenos Aires? Since I've been to Detroit, I'll have to take some time to tell everyone about my war experiences. :roll:
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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I've been in the heat of the battle in Afghanistan....while in front of my TV set.
Guess that makes me a war veteran.
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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Much like Hillary and her sniper fire!
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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BlackCrypt wrote:Much like Hillary and her sniper fire!
Bill?
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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Danzig in the Dark wrote:
BlackCrypt wrote:Much like Hillary and her sniper fire!
Bill?
No, silly. Her sniper felt like it was on fire. She took care of it with this:

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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

Post by SeminiferousButtNoid »

O'Reilly definitely bullshitted about his Falklands coverage. He covered riots and insurrections between Argentine police and protestors in Buenos Aires, and then misrepresented that as being in the actual war zone on the islands. It's no shocker because the guy has exaggerated his entire career, like his working class Levittown, MA mick Irish hero crap.

And the fact that O'Reilly will never be fired or reprimanded by Fox News is just confirmation that he is the TV extension of a talk radio clown like Rush Limbaugh. Nothing he says was ever meant to be taken seriously from jump street.
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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Bill O'Reilly lied about coverage of combat in Falklands War, acted in disruptive manner: ex-CBS colleague
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.2124604

The accusations continue to pile on for Bill O'Reilly about whether or not he did in fact cover a combat zone when reporting on the Falklands War in 1982.

Another former colleague who was with O'Reilly claimed In a lengthy post on his Facebook page the scene was nothing more than "routine reporting on a demonstration that got a little nasty."

But the Fox host continues to fight back against these claims that originated with a report by Mother Jones that claimed he made Brian Williams-esque exaggerations when he said he saw “active war zones" while covering the conflict. O’Reilly had previously told the Daily News these accusations were “bull---t."

Former CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg wrote the "bloviater" O'Reilly, who was "full of brio and confidence," was misrepresenting the situation to "burnish his credentials as a ‘war correspondent’" and should be "ashamed of himself."

"I don't think it's as big a lie as Brian Williams told because O'Reilly hasn't falsely claimed to be the target of an enemy attack, but he has displayed a willingness to twist the truth in a way that seeks to invent a battlefield that did not exist," Engberg wrote. "And he ought to be subject to the same scrutiny Williams faced."

Engberg and O'Reilly were two of five correspondents dispatched to cover the conflict off the coast of Argentina in 1982, but the group was in Buenos Aires - about a thousand miles away from the conflict.

"To begin with 'covering' is an overstatement of what we were doing," Engberg wrote. "We were in Buenos Aires because that's the only place the Argentine military junta would let journalists go. Our knowledge of the war was restricted to what we could glean from comically deceitful daily briefings given by the Argentine military and watching government-controlled television to try to pick up a useful clue from propaganda broadcasts."

The American reporters "were all in the same, modern hotel and we never saw any troops, casualties or weapons. It was not a war zone or even close. It was an 'expense account zone,'" he wrote.

When Argentina surrendered, a group of reporters were sent to the streets to cover the mass public's angry reaction.

"O'Reilly was the one person who behaved unprofessionally and without regard for the safety of the camera crew he was leading," he said.

The reporters had been instructed not to turn on their lights out of fear the people would react violently to American journalists because of the country's support of Britain in the conflict, he wrote. But O'Reilly demanded his cameraman use his lights for his reports,

And when O'Reilly was told his footage would be used in a main package narrated by the anchor Bob Schieffer, he exploded. "I didn't come down here to have my footage used by that old man."

This led to Larry Doyle, the CBS bureau chief in Buenos Aires, telling CBS that O'Reilly had become a "disruptive force" who threatened his bureau's morale and cohesion and he was sent home, Engberg wrote.

He further stated the only violence O'Reilly saw was a "relatively tame riot" and no one on his crew suffered injuries, nor did he experience gunfire.

"O'Reilly's claim that the army fired weapons into the crowd is not supported by anyone's recollection. Had that happened, I believe, the riot would have escalated into an uncontrollable attack on government buildings all over the capital," Engberg wrote. "Nothing like that happened. Actually, the military chiefs, yielding to the public outcry over the war's outcome, were willing to give up their offices, which they did the next day."

But on Fox News Sunday, O’Reilly classified Engberg’s post as part of a smear campaign and answered his former colleague’s accusations.

He called the classification of the situation as a relatively tame riot as “absurd” and read from a New York Times article at the time that reported on gun shots fired by police officers and buses being set on fire.

O’Reilly accused of Engberg, whom he called a "coward," of not knowing the severity of the situation because he was still in the hotel.

“I’d like everybody to ask him ‘were you there?’” O’Reilly said. “Because his reputation, his nickname was ‘Room Service Eric.’”

He also said he was never told not to turn on his camera light. He said Engberg was mad at him because he accused the colleague of “big footing” him in 1998 by putting his name on O’Reilly’s work.

The host declined to rephrase earlier comments that he covered a combat zone and said he hopes to get the video he shot from CBS and air it on his program.

“When you have soldiers and military police firing into the crowd as the New York Times reports. And you have people injured and hurt. And you are in the middle of that. That’s the definition (of a combat zone). This is splitting hair trying anything they can to bring down me because of the Brian Williams situation,” he said.

The Mother Jones report, written by David Corn and Daniel Schulman, questioned the similarities between O'Reilly's various instances of recounting the conflict off the coast of Argentina and the situation with NBC Anchor Brian Williams who was suspended six months after it was revealed he was untruthful when he said his helicopter was fired upon while in Iraq in 2003.

"O'Reilly has recounted dramatic stories about his own war reporting that don't withstand scrutiny-even claiming he acted heroically in a war zone that he apparently never set foot in," the report states.

Corn, using Engberg's post as ammunition, continues to question the Fox host's credibility.

"Now that a nearly three-decade CBS News correspondent has spoken up, O'Reilly will have to find a new defense," he tweeted Saturday.

O'Reilly told The News Friday he covered thousands storming the palace in Buenos Aires, trying to kill the country's president, Leopoldo Galtieri, when the country surrendered.

"The Argentine army pulled up in giant trucks, came out with guns and opened fire on the crowd. The video (we filed for CBS Evening News) shows that; it's on the Internet, you can see it. We shot it," he said. "That was combat. Soldiers shooting at people who were trying to overthrow the government."

"This is bull---t. The whole thing is a made-up, contrived hit piece by a smear merchant," he added, referring to Corn, a former Fox News employee.

A Fox spokesman told The News Sunday “Bill O'Reilly has invited Eric Engberg, Dan Rather and former CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter on the show -- Engberg declined but we look forward to hearing what Rather and Sauter have to say.”
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

Post by Turner Coates »

http://deadline.com/2015/02/bill-oreill ... 201381538/

UPDATE: Bill O’Reilly says that when he said, “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head” he was referring to having seen photographs of the nuns who were executed in El Salvador in 1980, and not claiming he actually saw the murdered nuns:
“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered,” O’Reilly said this afternoon after a report came out questioning his account of his reporting in El Salvador. “The mention of the nuns on my program came the day of the Newtown massacre (December 14, 2012). The segment was about evil and how hard it is for folks to comprehend it. I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil. That’s what I am referring to when I say, ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ No one could possibly take that segment as reporting on El Salvador.”
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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Wheresthestagemanager? wrote:http://deadline.com/2015/02/bill-oreill ... 201381538/

UPDATE: Bill O’Reilly says that when he said, “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head” he was referring to having seen photographs of the nuns who were executed in El Salvador in 1980, and not claiming he actually saw the murdered nuns:
“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered,” O’Reilly said this afternoon after a report came out questioning his account of his reporting in El Salvador. “The mention of the nuns on my program came the day of the Newtown massacre (December 14, 2012). The segment was about evil and how hard it is for folks to comprehend it. I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil. That’s what I am referring to when I say, ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ No one could possibly take that segment as reporting on El Salvador.”
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Then an intelligent person would have said "I saw photos of nuns shot in the back of the head" not "I SAW nuns GET shot in the back of the head" O'Rly...
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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Just as Bill O'Reilly was trying to move on from a dispute over his war stories, the Fox News host suddenly has more questions to answer.

This time, the scrutiny is being directed at an account of his investigation into John F. Kennedy's assassination.

O'Reilly's telling of it has gone like this: In 1977, Russian-born George de Mohrenschildt, who knew Lee Harvey Oswald, had been contacted by congressional investigators. O'Reilly, a reporter for a Dallas TV station, had tracked de Mohrenschildt down in Palm Beach, and arrived at the door to his daughter's home just as he shot himself.

O'Reilly shared that account in his book, "Killing Kennedy," and has repeated it on Fox News.

"As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt's daughter's home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood," O'Reilly wrote in his book. "By the way, that reporter's name is Bill O'Reilly."

The question being raised: Was O'Reilly really there?

Jefferson Morley, a visiting professor at the University of California and a former editor at the Washington Post, doesn't think so. Writing for his website JFKFacts.org in 2013, Morley used phone recordings to dispute the dramatic account.

Morley's post resurfaced on Tuesday in a new report from liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.

The phone recordings, from the day of the suicide, came from the widow of Gaeton Fonzi, a congressional investigator involved in the JFK assassination probe.

Fonzi knew O'Reilly, and the recordings describe a conversation in which O'Reilly asked for confirmation of the suicide, according to Morley. Morley has posted a partial transcript and the recordings, though they are inaudible.

On the recordings, O'Reilly acknowledges he is in Dallas and plans to head to Florida, according to Morley.

Fonzi also recalled in his 1993 memoir that O'Reilly called him to confirm the suicide.

"Funny thing happened," Fonzi recalled O'Reilly saying over the phone. "We just aired a story that came over the wire about a Dutch journalist saying the Assassinations Committee has finally located de Mohrenschildt in South Florida. Now de Mohren--schildt's attorney, a guy named Pat Russell, he calls and says de Mohrenschildt committed suicide this afternoon. Is that true?"

Fonzi's widow, Marie, told Morley in 2013 that "Gaet liked O'Reilly and did lots to help him." But she insisted O'Reilly was nowhere near the scene of the suicide. "I know O'Reilly was in Dallas," she said. "There is no question about it."

Another possible red flag in O'Reilly's account: An Associated Press report at the time quoted a member of the Palm Beach County, Florida sheriff's office who said that de Mohrenschildt was home alone at the time of his suicide "except for two maids who said they did not hear the shot."

When reached for comment, a Fox News spokesperson referred CNNMoney to Henry Holt and Company, the imprint that published O'Reilly's book on the Kennedy assassination.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/25/media/b ... index.html
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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Wheresthestagemanager? wrote:http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02 ... h-of-lies/

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly had sharp words for a Thursday report alleging he misled viewers about his time covering the Falklands War.

“It’s a bunch of lies and a politically motivated hit piece,” O’Reilly told TheBlaze by phone Thursday evening, adding, “Everything I have said is absolutely 100 percent true.”

I'm gonna believe Bill on this one. If anybody knows about politically-motivated hit pieces, it's Bill Goddamned O'Reilly.
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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http://deadline.com/2015/02/bill-oreill ... 201380057/


UPDATE with NYT interview and The O‘Reilly Factor ratings: Hours after Bill O’Reilly again defended his characterization of his reporting from Buenos Aires in 1982 with broadcast excerpts of CBS News’ coverage of the protests there at the end of the Falklands War, and told viewers “I want to stop this now. I hope we can stop it,” the New York Times took him in another direction.

O’Reilly has been exchanging blows with various media outlets and journalists questioning his account of how he covered the Buenos Aires protests in follow-ups to a Mother Jones article headlined Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem.

Not long after The O’Reilly Factor telecast, NYT published an article about how O’Reilly and Fox News had “redouble[d] defense of his Falklands reporting.” Paragraph of that article said: “Mr. O’Reilly’s efforts to refute the claims by Mother Jones and some former CBS News colleagues occurred both on the air and off on Monday. During a phone conversation, he told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter’s coverage was inappropriate. “I am coming after you with everything I have,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “You can take it as a threat.”

The New York Times journalists who wrote the article, apparently unused to having people they cover try to strong-arm them, corrected that lead-burying error by drawing attention to Graf 6 on Twitter:

“I am coming after you with everything I have,” Mr. O’Reilly told me. “You can take it as a threat.” http://t.co/gXsH3Zqaig

— Emily Steel (@emilysteel) February 24, 2015

Meanwhile, the idea of O’Reilly going after the New York Times caused such a kerfuffle, the report spread like a bad rash among reporters covering the O’Reilly in Buenos Aires story.

If only the NYT article had published long before last night’s O’Reilly Factor, his ratings could have been stupendous. As it was, word he would air the CBS footage he promised would vindicate him drove viewers to his show by double-digit jumps compared to one week earlier. An average of 3.3 million tuned in to his show last night — his biggest audience this year to date, and since November 25 of last year during the Ferguson verdict news cycle. In the news demo, he clocked 568,000 viewers, besting CNN’s entire primetime lineup last night — in total viewers.

PREVIOUS, MONDAY PM: “I want to stop this now,” Bill O’Reilly said tonight on The O’Reilly Factor after showing video CBS News had posted online from its coverage of Buenos Aires demonstrations that erupted after Argentina surrendered to the British in the Falklands War in June 1982. (Watch CBS’ video above.)

The Fox News Channel star also read, as expected, from a Christian Science Monitor article written at that time, in which the demonstrations were described as having reached a point at which “police were unable to control angry mobs that turned the Plaza de Mayo … into a battle zone.” For days now, O’Reilly has addressed reports questioning his account of how he covered the Buenos Aires protests — triggered by that Mother Jones article penned by David Corn.



Separately, the author of a 1982 New York Times article fired back after O’Reilly read the article during a Sunday appearance on FNC’s all-things-media show Mediabuzz. In a Facebook post, the author dinged O’Reilly for leaving out one part of a sentence about a police officer whom he’d reported had fired five shots — the “over the heads of” fleeing demonstrators part.

O’Reilly’s guest tonight, Don Browne, spent 30 years with NBC and NBCU, joining the company in 1979 as Miami bureau chief, where O’Reilly said he oversaw NBC News’s coverage of the 74-day Falklands War between the UK and Argentina.

“At first, Buenos Aires was a pretty nice place to be if you were covering the war, but as it turned out, it got progressively more intense,” Browne said. “These were veteran correspondents, we saw the situation escalating,” he continued, describing the situation as “business as usual, what they were sent there to do.”

Browne stopped short of calling it a “riot” or a “war zone.”

“You call it a riot – it was a very intense situation where people got hurt and it was a very serious confrontation, and it was a defining moment, when the populace really turned on the military,” Browne said.

Pressed by O’Reilly, Browne said, “Any situation like that, where you bring that kind of intensity together in a protest where the police and, in this case the military, are reacting aggressively, it’s a dangerous cocktail. ”

O’Reilly said in wrapping up the segment: “So there you go. I want to stop this now. I hope we can stop it. I really do.”
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

Post by Turner Coates »

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/opinion/l ... l-oreilly/

(CNN)Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, grappling with accusations that he embellished and/or fabricated reports placing him at the center of dramatic news events, tipped his hand more than he realized by threatening one of the many journalists asking questions about the accuracy of his accounts.

"I am coming after you with everything I have," O'Reilly told New York Times reporter Emily Steel. "You can take it as a threat."

Bad move, Bill.

In the real world of tough guys (as opposed to celebrity blowhards), that kind of empty threat only comes from a sore loser -- somebody unable to control or hide his anger, fright and impotence over the fact he has been cornered and beaten. There is nothing O'Reilly can do to harm The New York Times, its reporters or any other journalist doing their job, and he surely knows that.

So why the tantrum?

Part of it is O'Reilly's style. He is a fabulously wealthy, best-selling author and the host of a show that has dominated prime-time cable news for many years. One way he got to the top of the heap was by styling himself as a plain-spoken, working-class battler, willing to mix it up verbally with those who disagree with him.

As ex-Rep. Barney Frank -- a gay, outspokenly liberal Democrat who sparred with O'Reilly -- explained to The Daily Beast: "When you go on his show, you have two choices: either be reasonable and let him dominate with his ranting, or yell back at him. You either look timid or as boorish as he is."

The verbal fireworks make for a certain kind of TV that can be fun to watch and has proved enormously popular, but it doesn't give O'Reilly a pass to make things up and not get called on it. His dramatic claims to have reported from a war zone during the Falklands conflict -- an account complete with troops firing into crowds, a gun pointed at his head and O'Reilly saving a gravely wounded colleague -- has been disputed by seven of his colleagues who were on assignment in Argentina with him.

More recently, reporters have questioned O'Reilly's claim -- printed in his book, "Killing Kennedy" -- to have heard the gunshot that killed George de Mohrenschildt, a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed President John Kennedy.

Mohrenschildt's death was dramatic, important news: He killed himself in Florida shortly after being contacted by congressional investigators probing the assassination. It's hard to believe that O'Reilly, then working on stories about the assassination for Dallas television station WFAA, would have sat on the news that he was present and heard the shotgun blast that killed Mohrenschildt.

Once again, a little probing by journalists turns up evidence from reliable sources that O'Reilly's account is probably false.

Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post editor, has posted audio tapes of O'Reilly talking with a congressional investigator around the time of the incident in conversations that leave little doubt that O'Reilly was in Dallas at the time Mohrenschildt died.

"He was in Dallas" says Tracy Rowlett, who worked at WFAA at the time, according to the Huffington Post. "Bill O'Reilly's a phony -- there's no other way to put it."

Sally Quinn, former columnist and veteran Washington insider who is a friend of O'Reilly's, defended him in a way that is less than helpful.

"O'Reilly is an entertainer and everything he does is totally subjective, including his memories," she told The Daily Beast. "To attack him is simply to increase his ratings and the sales of his phenomenally popular books. Lighten up, everybody."

That's easier said than done, especially after O'Reilly chose to start threatening reporters. His best move now would be to do the difficult, responsible thing, the thing truly great journalists have been doing for decades: admit he screwed up, apologize and try to move on.

That might damage his brand as the swaggering no-spin guy, and it might even lose him some viewers. But it would begin to restore his reputation in a profession that isn't perfect and doesn't expect its practitioners to be -- but also doesn't expect valid questions to be answered with the snarling, empty threats of a coward.
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Re: O’Reilly Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Report' About His War Repor

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http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/201 ... 03331.html

CNN publishes O'Reilly tape

CNN has published a recording of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly from the 1970s that indicates he was not present outside the Florida house where an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald committed suicide.

In the taped telephone conversation conducted in March 1977 between O’Reilly, then a correspondent with Dallas television station WFAA-TV, and Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, O’Reilly can be heard telling Fonzi he’s planning to travel to Florida to investigate the suicide of George de Mohrenschildt, an associate of Oswald’s who had killed himself that day.

In the conversation, provided to CNN by Fonzi’s widow, Fonzi tells O’Reilly about the suicide. O'Reilly in turn replies he'll travel to Florida the next day.

"I'm coming down there tomorrow," O’Reilly tells Fonzi. "I'm coming to Florida. … Now, OK, I'm gonna try to get a night flight out of here, if I can.”

In his book “Killing Kennedy,” and on Fox News, O’Reilly has claimed that he was standing on the porch of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s house in Florida when he heard a gunshot sound, which he said was the sound of de Mohrenschildt killing himself.

Former colleagues of O'Reilly's have also come forward, saying O'Reilly was not in Florida at the time of the suicide.

Fox News hasn’t responded to the specific allegations regarding the de Mohrenschildt suicide anecdote but has defended its star host as he faces a series of other charges that he’s been exaggerating his reporting history, calling the allegations an orchestrated attack by left-wing advocates. A spokesperson for Henry Holt, the publisher of “Killing Kennedy,” told CNN, "This one passage is immaterial to the story being told by this terrific book and we have no plans to look into this matter.”
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