BILL O’REILLY is getting heated as he faces accusations that he exaggerated his war reporting experience.
The Fox News host reportedly threatened a New York Times reporter who was writing about allegations that O’Reilly misled people by saying he had reported from a war zone.
From The Times:
During a phone conversation, [O'Reilly] 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.’
O’Reilly has denied embellishing stories from his time covering the Falklands War in Argentina.
Some of O’Reilly’s former colleagues have accused him of exaggerating the danger he and others were in while covering protests in Argentina.
O’Reilly wrote in his 2001 book, “The No Spin Zone: Confrontations With the Powerful and Famous in America,” that “many were killed” in a 1982 riot in Argentina, but other reporters who were there say no civilians were killed.
In an interview on Fox’s Mediabuzz show, O’Reilly pointed to a New York Times story from the time that said a policeman “pulled a pistol” and fired five shots during a protest.
However, he left out the part of the sentence that noted the shots were fired “over the heads of fleeing demonstrators,” as the Times reporter who wrote the story pointed out on Facebook on Monday.
“What I saw on the streets that night was a demonstration — passionate, chaotic, and memorable — but it would be hard to confuse it with being in a war zone,” Rich Meislin, the Times reporter, said in his Facebook post.
O’Reilly said he was just reading clips from the Times piece and that official casualty reports were hard to come by, according to The Times.
While he was covering the Falklands War, O’Reilly was stationed in Buenos Aires, according to CNN, more than 1,000 miles from the actual conflict zone.
Mother Jones first highlighted discrepancies in O’Reilly’s retellings of his time in Argentina last week.
O’Reilly has said he didn’t embellish anything, and he called the Mother Jones report “irresponsible.” He accused the magazine of trying to “smear” him and called it “the bottom rung of journalism in America.” Fox News released a statement saying the network was in “full support” of O’Reilly.
The accusations against O’Reilly come shortly after NBC News anchor Brian Williams was dealt a six-month suspension for exaggerating stories from his coverage of the Iraq invasion.
- Pamela Engel
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