It’s been a banner couple of weeks for Bill O’Reilly. In the wake of Brian Williams’s suspension for fabricating conflict experience, O’Reilly has been under fire for fabricating a whole bunch of conflict experiences. Fox News has been supportive of their biggest name in light of reporters questioning his involvement in the Falklands War, but last week, when Media Matters reported that O’Reilly had lied about witnessing the suicide of a man potentially involved in the JFK assassination, Fox did that thing where they put their hand over their face and pretend they didn’t hear you. Reporters then began questioning O’Reilly’s story that he’d been witness to terrorist bombings in Northern Ireland. When asked about that experience last week, O’Reilly’s story went from “in the trenches” to “in a scrapbook.”
Asked about O’Reilly’s statements Friday, a Fox News spokesman said 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.
This is similar to another recent “clarification” O’Reilly made about witnessing the murder of nuns in El Salvador, that was actually, again, witnessing photos taken by photographers who witnessed the murder of nuns in El Salvador.
The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America found two occasions on which O’Reilly claimed to have seen the murder of four American nuns in El Salvador. “I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador,” he said on his radio program in 2005. On his Fox News program, “The O’Reilly Factor,” he said in 2012, “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.”
But O’Reilly arrived in El Salvador months after the brutal killings and could not have witnessed them, the group said.
O’Reilly said in a statement this week that he was describing photos of the murdered nuns, not the crimes themselves.
“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered,” he said in the statement.
O’Reilly said he brought up the El Salvador episode on his TV program in 2012 on the day of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in a discussion on evil. “I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil,” his statement said. “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.”
This has been Bill O’Reilly talks about pictures of things.
Via Washington Post