Under Scrutiny For Fabrications, O'Reilly Shifts Focus To Claim Fox News Is Under Siege
Written by Olivia Kittel
Published
Bill O'Reilly tried to shift focus away from the scrutiny he is facing for embellishing his reporting career by claiming that Fox News is under attack.
After Mother Jones called into question O'Reilly's accounts of covering the 1982 Falklands War, a number of journalists -- including many of O'Reilly's former CBS News colleagues -- and an Argentine historian have discredited O'Reilly's description of the riot he covered as a combat situation where “many were killed.” And more holes have been exposed in other accounts of his reporting career -- his claim that he personally “heard” a shotgun blast that killed a figure in the investigation into President John F. Kennedy's assassination while reporting for a Dallas television station in 1977 has also been contradicted by his former colleagues at the station as well as a police report, contemporaneous reporting, and a congressional investigator who was probing Kennedy's death.
On the February 24 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly attempted to shift focus away from scrutiny surrounding discrepancies in his accounts of his reporting career by claiming that Fox News is under attack. Pointing to criticism disputing his claims about covering the 1982 Falklands War as a CBS News correspondent, O'Reilly claimed that despite rebutting such criticism, the media attacks against him have been “vicious, it's more vicious now than it [has] ever been.” O'Reilly asserted that the reason he and his Fox News colleagues are under attack is because “Fox gives voice to conservatives and traditional people,” and are “putting tremendous pressure on the Obama administration to fight the terror savages,” and holding Hillary Clinton accountable ahead of a potential 2016 presidential bid. O'Reilly added, “On a personal note, I'm pretty tired of all the garbage”: