O'Reilly Cameraman Disputes Fox News Host's Falklands "War Zone" Story
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly continues to insist that he never misrepresented or embellished his wartime reporting experiences and other previous episodeseven after CNN, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Media Matters, and Mother Jones reported significant discrepancies between O'Reilly's accounts and what actually occurred. Last Tuesday, O'Reilly appeared on David Letterman's show, where he maintained he had always been "accurate" when discussing his journalistic exploits and had never "fibbed" on air. ("Not that I know of," he said.) Yet O'Reilly's characterizations of his reporting during the Falklands war, El Salvador's civil war, the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and the 1977 re-investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination have been repeatedly challenged, in several cases by former colleagues. Now a principal character in one of O'Reilly's more dramatic talesin which the Fox commentator plays a heroic rolesays this particular story is not accurate.
In recounting his experiences as a CBS News correspondent reporting from a "war zone" during the 1982 Falklands war, O'Reilly has said that he rescued a CBS colleague during a violent protest that erupted near the presidential palace in Buenos Aires after Argentina surrendered to the British. During a 2013 episode of the O'Reilly Factor, he recalled:
I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off, you know, but at the same time, I'm looking around and trying to do my job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was more important.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/cameraman-disputes-bill-oreilly-falklands-war-story