Veterans Group Wants Fox News To Take Bill O’Reilly Off The Air

A veterans group is calling on ‘Fox News’ to take Bill O’Reilly off the air, much the same as NBC did with Brian Williams, after a report in Mother Jones accused O’Reilly of exaggerating his combat reporting experiences during the 1982 Falklands War.

Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org, which has 400,000 active members, said in a statement:

NBC acted completely appropriately in taking Brian Williams off the air and looking into claims he’s made over the years. Fox News has to do the same thing. The issue, for me, isn’t that Fox has been caught off guard, and didn’t realize O’Reilly was telling possibly false tales. That I can accept. It’s what do they do about it now? That will tell us a lot about how seriously they take their news organization.” 

Fox and O’Reilly, however, have fought back against the Mother Jones report. In typical O’Reilly fashion, the host tried to smear the author of the story, David Corn, by saying:

“This man, 56-year-old David Corn, who works for the far-left magazine Mother Jones, smeared me, your humble correspondent, yesterday, saying I had fabricated some war reporting.”

Thursday, Mother Jones reported that O’Reilly had fabricated actually witnessing fighting between Great Britain and Argentina as he alleges. The magazine says no American reporters ever reached the combat zone and therefore O’Reilly could not have seen what he maintains he saw. The report added:

“(O’Reilly) repeatedly told his audience that he was a war correspondent during the Falklands war and that he experienced combat during that 1982 conflict between England and Argentina. He has often invoked this experience to emphasize that he understands war as only someone who has witnessed it could. As he once put it, ‘I’ve been there. That’s really what separates me from most of these other bloviators. I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I’ve seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven’t.’”

NBC News suspended longtime anchor and managing editor Brian Williams for six months without pay for incorrectly recalling details of reports he filed from Iraq and New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. O’Reilly applauded the Williams suspension and said it showed the liberal bias of the network.

And now it seems like karma has come back to bite Bill on his bloviating posterior.

This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org

 

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