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SIGN THE PETITION: Fox News should suspend Bill O'Reilly for his Falklands combat lies

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David Corn of Mother Jones published a scathing article exposing Bill O'Reilly's lies that he was involved in combat in the Falklands. In 2013, Bill O'Reilly stated:

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 BET HE PULLED OUT A GUN AND SHOT THEM INDIANS DEAD TOO.

Yet in his own memoir O'Reilly doesn't describe even being anywhere near
the Falkland Islands. After the Mother Jones piece was published, O'Reilly lashed out at David Corn by calling him a "despicable guttersnipe."

Journalists should be held to standards. Brian Williams was suspended from NBC News for 6 months for lying about being in combat. Why should it be any different for Bill O'Reilly?

Sign the petition and tell Fox News to suspend Bill O'Reilly for his Falklands combat lies.

HYPOCRACY REIGNS AMONG CONSERVATIVES ALONG With LYING AND LYING AND LYING

Here's the other part of the story

Bill O’Reilly’s humiliating bust: Does Fox News have guts to suspend its own serial exaggerator?
Mother Jones shows Fox host has his own “Brian Williams problem.” Now we'll learn whether Fox cares about "truth"


TOPICS: BILL O'REILLY, FOX NEWS, BRIAN WILLIAMS, MOTHER JONES, DAVID CORN, DANIEL SCHULMAN, FALKLANDS WAR, CBS, BOB SCHIEFFER, EL SALVADOR, POLITICO, MEDIA NEWS, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

Joan Walsh

Bill O'Reilly (Credit: Fox News)
Bill O’Reilly was predictably sanctimonious about the troubles of NBC’s Brian Williams – sanctimony shot with schadenfreude is the best kind of high for the Fox bully. So when Mother Jones charged O’Reilly with exaggerating his own war reporting record Thursday night, it didn’t take long for him to launch a counter-attack. He called story co-author David Corn a “despicable guttersnipe” and told Politico that Corn had been trying to take him down “for years.”


That in itself was a sign that the punch landed; normally O’Reilly doesn’t descend from his perch in the “no-spin zone” to debate mere mortals on platforms besides Fox. The Mother Jones story is embarrassing, but it’s probably not fatal. Most of the “reporting” on Fox has roughly the same relationship with the truth as O’Reilly’s claim to combat zone action. I can’t see him facing censure for this, but I hope I’m wrong.

If you missed the action, Corn and Daniel Schulman reported that despite O’Reilly’s claims of having “survived a combat operation” during the Falklands War, the Fox host, then with CBS, only got as close as Buenos Aires, roughly 1,400 miles away from the fighting. “Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands,” CBS’s Bob Schieffer told Mother Jones. “I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.”

There was, of course, no combat in the Argentinian capital, but there was a raucous protest, and that’s apparently what O’Reilly refers to as a “combat operation.” He also claimed he was the only CBS reporter covering the demonstration, which Schieffer likewise denies. “We were all out with our camera crews that day to cover the protest,” Schieffer says. “I’d been out there with a crew too.”

Likewise, his claim of having seen combat danger in El Salvador is undermined by reporting – the reporting of Bill O’Reilly himself, on the ground, in real time. In his book “The No-Spin Zone” O’Reilly tells of visiting a dangerous, “guerrilla controlled area” with a camera crew, where “I quickly did a stand-up amid the rubble and we got the hell out of there.”