It’s been a bad week for Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. First Mother Jones magazine published a story in which it accused the loudmouthed O’Reilly of never having been near a “war zone” during the Falklands conflict. Now, former colleagues of O’Reilly say he could not have witnessed the suicide of a friend of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Why? Because he was in Dallas at the time of the suicide, which took place in Miami.
O’Reilly has said on numerous occasions that he went to Miami to interview George de Mohrenschildt, who was a friend of Oswald’s. The way O’Reilly tells the story, he was about to knock on de Mohrenschildt’s door when he heard the self-inflicted gunshot that killed the man. As O’Reilly recalled on Fox:
“I was about to knock on the door where [de Mohrenschildt] was, his daughter’s house, and he blew his brains out with a shotgun.”
But O’Reilly’s co-workers at Dallas TV station WFAA, say that isn’t true. Tracy Rowlett, who worked at WFAA when O’Reilly was there, told Media Matters:
“He was in Dallas. Bill O’Reilly’s a phony–there’s no other way to put it.”
Also, Rowlett’s account is corroborated by another associate from O’Reilly’s, Byron Harris. Harris reports that:
“(WFAA) would have reported it as some kind of exclusive–and there was no exclusive–if O’Reilly had been standing outside the door.”
The story of George de Mohrenschildt’s suicide was instead first reported in Dallas by the local newspaper, the Dallas Morning News.
O’Reilly has also been known to brag that while he was covering the civil war in El Salvador, he witnessed the execution of four Catholic nuns by the Salvadoran National Guard in 1980. But there’s a tiny problem with that statement: O’Reilly wasn’t in El Salvador for CBS until 1981, a full year after the nuns had been murdered.
Both Fox News and O’Reilly say the accusations against him are nothing but an attempt by left wing media to discredit him. Fox issued a statement saying:
“Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims leveled against him. This is nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates Mother Jones and Media Matters. Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. FOX News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.”
At this point, the only question that remains for Fox is this: Why is this man allowed to remain on the air? Bill O’Reilly was delighted when NBC News suspended anchor Brian Williams for six months without pay, yet Fox lets its primetime star stay on air. Why? The answer is self-evident. Fox, unlike NBC, is not in the business of news. Instead, it is, as we have long suspected, merely a vehicle for right wing propaganda. If nothing else, at least we now know this fact beyond all doubt.
The article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org