Holding Bill O’Reilly accountable for his lies would require journalists to read more than just the headlines of the charges against him–and that’s never going to happen, says Politico‘s Dylan Byers (2/23/15).
Mother Jones‘ David Corn (2/19/15) revealed that despite Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s claim (in his book The No-Spin Zone) to have “reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands,” in reality he was never on the islands that Argentina and Britain fought a war over in 1982.
An indignant O’Reilly (Daily News, 2/20/15) explained that he was talking about covering the anti-government protests in Buenos Aires that followed the war:
The Argentine army pulled up in giant trucks, came out with guns and opened fire on the crowd. The video [we filed for CBS Evening News] shows that; it’s on the internet, you can see it. We shot it…. That was combat. Soldiers shooting at people who were trying to overthrow the government.
Unfortunately for O’Reilly, that video doesn’t show anything that resembles combat. Instead, it features a voiceover from Bob Schieffer saying, “The police threatened to use teargas at one point, and several North American television crews were jostled”—the latter point presumably a reference to what O’Reilly “survived.”
It’s bad when journalists make things up for personal aggrandizement. But there’s a more important level of lying done in the service of power, particularly to justify state violence—and O’Reilly has a history of that, too.
Bill O’Reilly reporting for CBS News (5/20/82) from a Salvadoran village that was clearly not “leveled to the ground.”
Ten days before Corn’s piece appeared, Greg Grandin had a piece in The Nation (2/9/15) talking about O’Reilly’s recounting (in The No Spin Zone) of a report he did in 1982 for CBS about a remote village in El Salvador called Meanguera that had supposedly been “wiped out” by guerrillas. An intrepid O’Reilly filed a story from there:
The place was leveled to the ground and fires were still smoldering. But even though the carnage was obviously recent, we saw no one live or dead. There was absolutely nobody around who could tell us what happened. I quickly did a stand-up amid the rubble and we got the hell out of there…. The 90-second package contained great video and a fairly impressive “on the scene in a very bad place” stand-up by yours truly.
Once again, the report in question (dated 5/20/82) bears no resemblance to O’Reilly’s description: Meanguera was not “leveled,” nor was anything “smoldering”—rather, there were a couple of damaged buildings, and plenty of men, women and children going about their business on camera, all very much alive. The point of O’Reilly’s CBS report was not how frightening guerrilla violence was, but rather how well the Salvadoran government is doing against the rebels, thanks to US training: “These days, Salvadoran soldiers appear to be doing more singing than fighting,” O’Reilly declares.
O’Reilly reimagined of the Meanguera story—which was originally about how peaceful El Salvador had become—to show he had the “cojones” to go into what he called “Indian Country.” But Grandin points out a more sinister context. Meanguera was just a few miles from El Mozote, a village where the U.S.-created and -trained Atlacatl Brigade killed more than 700 civilians on December 11, 1981—one of the worst atrocities of the entire Cold War. As Grandin notes, “Going to Meanguera in early 1982 would be as if Seymour Hersh, when he first learned of the My Lai massacre, decided to investigate events the next town over.”
Grandin points out that Raymond Bonner, who went to El Mozote for the New York Times and documented the massacre, was subjected to concerted attacks from the Reagan administration, conservative media like the Wall Street Journal and the right-wing pressure group Accuracy In Media. “The Times sided with the critics, and Bonner eventually left the paper, after first being transferred to the business section,” Grandin writes—while O’Reilly, who went to Meanguera to do a feel-good story, “went on to transform cable TV.”
The story of O’Reilly’s war fabrications parallels the selective reporting on Brian Williams’ falsehoods (FAIR Blog, 2/5/15). Corn’s piece got a fair amount of attention in other media, which largely played it as a pissing match between two scrappy journalists. The Nation story, on the other hand, was largely overlooked.
O’Reilly’s lies about being under fire reflected on him and his employers, who declined to do anything about them. But corporate media as a whole averted their eyes from the El Mozote massacre. Start factchecking those lies, and you’re going to embarrass too many people.
