More fabrications have emerged. The latest: he claims to have personally witnessed nuns being executed in El Salvador.
He didn’t.
His excuse now? When he said “I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador,” and “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head,” what he actually meant is that he saw pictures of the aftermath of those crimes.
He’s toast. It’s a serious indictment of the quality of the news on Fox that rather than punishing him in any way, they’re battening down the hatches and insisting that the problem is that the other news media just hate them.
i thought lying was the expected norm for Fox.
Doesn’t Fox have a court order allowing them to lie and call it news? They’re all about the ratings; truth is for those lefty liberal types.
Even if this is so, I!m sure Fox will do nothing and claim that they hired O’Reilly as a commentator, not a reporter.
“…the other news media just hate them”
Probably because they are lying scumbags.
And knowing the way O’Reilly and the rest of Fox News think they likely think the nuns were murdered by leftist guerillas, and not by a government death squad.
@Anne (#2)
No. Fake internet story is fake.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/foxlies.asp
O’Reilly has been toast for years. They just keep pushing him back back the toaster for another go’round, no matter how charred he’s become.
@2 – That was a local news outfit affiliated with a Fox station, not Fox News itself. So, technically, no. Though, if you watch John Stewart’s 50 Fox News Lies in 50 Seconds, you may wonder what the practical difference is.
To say Bill O’Reilly is toast misunderstands his job. His job is not to tell truth to the public, but to tell his audience what they want to hear. Fox has already responded that O’Reilly is the victim of an orchestrated smear campaign by liberals, and, if you think his audience will not eat that up and allow him to come back stronger, you don’t understand the purpose of Fox News.
I hope he is done. But the commentary division of Fox news is the last place I would expect to see the standards of journalism to be upheld. So I hope he is toast, buttered, and eaten with orange marmalade. But I would not be surprised to see that he stays b/c it aint real journalism over there anyway.
I think O’Reilly could claim it was he that raised the flag of Mt. Surabachi while continuing to spray bullets into enemy positions thus protecting his comrades and two things would happen. First, the brain-dead zombies who listen to him religiously would begin braying their praises for his bravery and start sending threatening emails to the families of those who actually were there and second, Faux News would broadcast edited pictures of that event with O’Reilly’s face photoshopped in and then start bashing those who remember it differently as liberal enemies of the truth.
Ah. Thanks for the clarification. So Fox News Network isn’t licensed to lie, yet. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time…
But it’s worth pointing out that the FCC case mentioned in the snopes link happened during the Bush administration and Fox News promoted him so thinking that the FCC would be bias towards a Fox News affiliate isn’t unreasonable. The affiliate fired two reporters for refusing to air a story they knew was false as well as had an unmentioned conflict of interest. They were fired for having integrity meaning that fundamentally the affiliate claimed it had the right to force employees to lie.
Fox’s schtick is “The liberal media are lying to you so we’re the only ones you can trust.” So I don’t think they can respond positively to anything that comes from that ‘liberal media’ without contradicting that core narrative.
The people who watch Fox and O’Reilly at this point would most likely believe that it’s all an elaborate liberal plot to discredit O’Reilly. And it doesn’t help that CNN keeps trying to be “neutral.”
Nah, O’Reilly is toast because Megyn Kelly is dominating him.
I remember what O’Reilly said over my country (the Netherlands). Oh, the lies and misrepresentation.
One of my countrymen responded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPsFIsxM3w
And part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpU0NxPhA78
“The way they do the statistics in the Netherlands is different plus it’s a much smaller country”.
There was once a thing about euthanasia in the Netherlands, how old people wear bracelets that say “don’t euthanize me!” and that sort of thing. He’s a complete fraud.
@5: My thoughts exactly — the nuns were murdered by the sort of people O’Reilly is an apologist for.
I’m confused about the O’Reilly “scandal” – we’ve know for over a decade that pretty much everything the man spouts is a lie. Al Franken wrote a book about it, Jon Stewart has a TV show about it (for a little while longer), and half the time FOX ‘News’ segments can be dismissed out-of-hand for contradicting the clearly established nature of reality. Why do various people suddenly seem to care so much more? I’m glad they do, but seriously, what’s finally different?
John Horstman #17:
Pretty much a reaction to the Brian Williams story, I’d say.
Contrast the two. Williams’ claim was an exaggeration at worst: he was in a war zone, in a one of a flight of helicopters which was actually fired upon, and he got howled at by the right wing media and held up as an example of liberal dishonesty. O’Reilly, on the other hand, makes stories up from whole cloth, and they just shrug it off.
If you really want to punish O’Really, I’d suggest using Vegemite.
There’s a story in the New York Times this morning (page 1) about how Bill O’Reilly is not done and that his job with Fox is in fact quite safe. Sadly, I think they’re right.
Money comes in, bullshit comes out. Never a communication. You can’t explain that. Oh wait, actually you can.
Bill O’Really isn’t lying. Bill O’Really is just like Jesus, he sees all, even if you can’t see him. That’s why I always shower with all my clothes and a falafel.
O’Reilly would probably be toast elsewhere, this might stick if he was not working for Fox News, but I doubt their audience really cares and they know it. When they were angry over Brian Williams, it was not anger over journalistic integrity, it was an opportunity to go after someone they view as a liberal. They do not really care about lies, especially not those told by people they agree with, and will likely rationalize this away, call it a smear, a hit job, and keep watching. Until his actual audience actually starts caring and turning away, until he is no longer bringing in money, I do not see Fox News dropping him.
It’s a little odd to see O’Reilly bring this up; I thought he was a St. Reagan fan, whose brutal policy toward Latin America help make crimes like these murders possible.
Disgusting how the monstrous foreign policy O’Reilly regularly voices supports for on his show is nothing but source material when it comes to telling tall tales about his misadventures in journalism.
Fox News is a cable channel and as such is not subject to the same FCC oversight as over-the-air networks and broadcast stations.
The American Right Wing is never going away. You’ll be putting up with liars like Fox News for centuries to come.
… he [O’Reilly] said “I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador,” and “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head,”…
I saw that too: Salvador was one of Oliver Stone’s most realistic movies.
Bill O’Reilly provided the following explanation to the Rachel Maddow Show:
As Steve Benen, writer for the Maddow Blog, noted, O’Reilly is quibbling over the definition of “see.” O’Reilly’s explanation just doesn’t smell right. It also doesn’t explain why he said seven years ago: “I’ve seen much worse behavior on the masculine side than the feminine side in my life, all right? I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador.”
Apparently O’Reilly lies to his mother.
Link.
Lies come in, lies go out. Deliberate miscommunication. You can’t explain that.
For some reason both Faux noNews and this particular set of lies by Bullshite O’reLiar reminds me of this Bruce Cockburn song (performed by Alias Ron Kavana).
Lynna:
Let’s be fair. He probably lied about telling his mother that.
O’Reilly done? Puleeze! he works for Fox News. The only thing that would harm his career there is publically agreeing with Obama on something.
@30: Well, I was thinking of “Down Where The Death Squad Lives”, or “Tropic Moon”, or really any number of other Cockburn songs. American policy in Central America seriously pissed him off.
Some people here are confused. They think that Fox News is a news organization. Fox isn’t that. It’s a propaganda mill. Fox would lie about sports scores if Roger Ailes thought it would put anyone to the left of Scott Perry in a bad light. The only thing that might happen to O’Reilly is him being told not to be quite so blatant about his lies.
I’ve met people like Bill O’Reilly in my own life. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you have, or how brazen their lies are, you can never get them to admit they were wrong. It’s infuriating, and it wants you to keep pushing back again and again, but in the end, it is utterly futile. Best just to dump them from your life, if you can.
And what do you do when they’re powerful and bankrolled by massive special interests and have an audience in the millions? Assassinate him? No, we’re stuck with him until that quivering, doughy blood pump I refuse to dignify with the name “heart” finally clogs up or explodes in his chest. I sincerely hope it happens on air.
True story: I once got caught eating Vegemite by the spoonful.
Eamon Knight@33, Fair point. The song I linked-to@30 was more-or-less my introduction to Mr Cockburn. However, in the context of this thread, I wasn’t thinking so much of Mr Cockburn’s entirely justifible stance on USArseholierthanthouian policy, but, as I said, “Faux noNews and this particular set of lies by Bullshite O’reLiar”.
Nope, he doesn’t deserve the dark salty goodness (which is really nice with cheese).
Maybe use that awful ‘Marmite’ guck instead? With a mug of Bovril.
And there are more lies, this time from his reporting on the 92 LA Riots.
I guess that makes us all witnesses to O’Reilly’s drunken falafel-loofah sexy-talk since we read about it in a book.
When someone presents themself as a journalist and in that capacity claims that they’ve ‘seen’ something, it’s assumed by audiences that what they mean is that they witnessed it live and unedited, and not just saw photo or film footage of it after the fact.
Yes, Fox News and Bill O’Reilly are a joke to a lot of us already, but many still treat them as valid. It may seem like preaching to the choir when it’s posted on a site like this, but it’s extremely important for it to be publicized as widely as possible to break through the thin veneer of respectability that Fox News still has in some circles. The fact that it’s a joke must be remembered and restated as long as they’re around.
Consider my mind blown. Why would it matter how a channel is broadcast!?!
Never say “never” again.
Owlmirror in, thread won. I can explain that.
@David Marjonovic- basically, because people wanted to be able to broadcast stuff without the FCC getting in their face about it.
@43: Consider my mind blown. Why would it matter how a channel is broadcast!?!
Because radio bandwidth is a publicly-available, but finite resource, and in most countries usage rights are regulated by the government. Cable is provided by private carriers, and all a content creator needs to do is negotiate with the carrier for the channel space (which the carrier will sell them, if they think it’s attractive to their subscribers). (Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that. In Canada at least, there is some oversight of cable service, since cable providers often have a local monopoly. For example Sun News Network — dubbed “Fox News North” by its detractors — was recently refused inclusion in the “basic” package).
David Marjanović, here in America, the Federal Communications Commission was primarily set up to allocate radio frequencies. The regulation of what was said or shown over broadcast radio and television was kind of secondary. It wasn’t so much the government getting involved in censorship, as just managing a resource. The censorship usually came from complaints by groups of people, to which the government agency was theoretically responsible.
When cable TV came about, there was no resource, there was no recourse, and there was no government agency in charge of truth, quality, or censorship. A citizen might accidentally stumble across broadcast filth, or might object to having it radiating through the public air, but cable was literally nobody’s business except those who chose to connect to it.
I think. That is all based on my radio-broadcasting courses about forty years back. (Forty years? Frak.)
So no, nobody in the USA can do a thing about Faux Noose being a collection of lying shitweasels.