A good rule of callout culture is to never target someone for the same things you do. No adulterer is more insufferable, after all, than the fire-and-brimstone minister. But when NBC anchor Brian Williams was exposed for fabricating stories of journalistic heroism, poor Bill O'Reilly just couldn't help himself. There was Williams, that prick, garnering widespread acclaim for the kind of stories Bill had already been making up for years.
A real American doesn't tolerate that kind of crap, and Bill O'Reilly is a real American. He has evolved into a post-fact reality, nightly defending a singular nation of fear and confabulation against all enemies foreign and domestic. He is a fiction more palpable than himself, and he can't stop, because it's all he has.
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Some of the story is probably familiar to you. O'Reilly has lied high and low during his nearly 19 years at Fox News, but the latest round of scrutiny about his stories began with
an article in The Nation questioning whether O'Reilly's reporting aided in covering up a massacre in El Salvador in 1982. Instead of primarily focusing on whether O'Reilly acted as a stooge for murderous conservative policy 14 years before his Fox gig, the media instead latched onto O'Reilly's claims that he'd reported from a leveled town where no one was left alive or dead, when in fact
The Nation's article included O'Reilly's CBS footage of a very much not-leveled town with at least eight people walking around in the background of his shots.
That article and O'Reilly's pummeling Brian Williams inspired
Mother Jones' David Corn and Daniel Schulman to look closely at
O'Reilly's other tales of hazardous, daring reportage, including his claims to have been in a "war zone" during the Falklands War. Despite O'Reilly's calling Corn a "despicable guttersnipe" and attempting to handwave away the accusations as a liberal hit job,
Corn and Shulman's charges have stuck. The nearest O'Reilly — or any other American reporter — got to the war zone was 1,200 miles, and his fallback assertion that protests he "alone" covered in Buenos Aires constituted one have been debunked multiple times over
by O'Reilly's former colleagues. Worse,
O'Reilly's own footage contradicts his story that he had a gun pulled on him.
The hits keep coming. Former colleagues flatly deny
O'Reilly's story that he was attacked by rioters in the 1992 L.A. riots. His story that he witnessed bombings in Northern Ireland was
denied by Fox News' own spokesman. Further, his claim that he was on the doorstep when a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's committed suicide
was impeached by the fact that O'Reilly was in Dallas at the time, (another) 1,200 miles away from the shooting.
This constant churning of preposterous shyt runs through O'Reilly's career like discarded picnic food through geese, a steaming heap of compensatory fantasy meeting defensive wish fulfillment.
Media Matters could update daily by debunking
The O'Reilly Factor alone. He claimed his tabloid show
Inside Edition won two Peabody Awards. He turned a comfortable childhood in the post-war suburban planned community of Levittown (with regular Florida vacations) into an
Oliver Twist-tinged struggle, to complete the Horatio Alger arc corporealizing him as the American dream: "You don't come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale." Those who would dare wake him from it are met with violence. "I am coming after you with everything I have," he
told the New York Times' Emily Steel. "You can take it as a threat."
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