This evening, Bill O'Reilly responded to the general derision aimed at his ludicrous false claim that no one on Fox News ever “said people will go to jail if they don't buy mandatory insurance.” O'Reilly attacked Media Matters for noting the plethora of examples of Fox News personalities doing just that, claiming that at the time Fox issued those reports, there was such a provision in the bill, but it was removed from the bill's final version. Watch:

That is some serious spin. In fact, as we noted in response to those Fox News segments, the version of the bill under discussion at that time also did not include jail time as a penalty for failure to buy insurance.

But in his desperate attempt to preserve his credibility, O'Reilly neglected to distribute his talking points to the rest of the Fox News crew. Yesterday, Cavuto contradicted O'Reilly during an interview with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who started this whole controversy when he told a constituent the health care jail-time claim “makes for good TV news on Fox but that isn't the intention.” Cavuto acknowledged, “You're quite right, I've researched this and a number of Fox personalities had made that comment.”

Given that he works for what is essentially the GOP's communications arm, you'd think that O'Reilly would be better at message control.