Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly has rejected accusations by a Mother Jones magazine article that he had used Brian Williams-like exaggeration to falsely characterize his career as a war correspondent.
The left-leaning American magazine alleged on Thursday that the "O'Reilly Factor" host has repeatedly misidentified himself as a war correspondent in books and on-air commentary by claiming he had seen "active war zones" while covering Britain's Falklands War in the early 1980s for CBS, even though no American journalist was on the island during the conflict between the British and the Argentines, New York Daily News reported.
"There is nothing in this memoir indicating that O'Reilly witnessed the fighting between British and Argentine military forces - or that he got anywhere close to the Falkland Islands, which are 300 miles off Argentina's shore and about 1,200 miles south of Buenos Aires," the report stated.
"He has often invoked this experience to emphasize that he understands war as only someone who has witnessed it could," it said, adding that his account of violent protests on the streets of Buenos Aires after the Argentines surrender stood "at odds with news reports from the time."
But the 65-year-old political commentator described the report as "bull---t" and "a bunch of garbage," stating that he had never claimed to have set foot on the Falkland Islands during the war, according to Los Angeles Times.
"Everything I've said about my career is 100 percent accurate," he said. "I never said I was on the Falkland Islands - nobody was. I said I covered the Falklands war, which we all did from Argentina and Uruguay, and I was in both places."
"That wasn't the only place the fighting was," O'Reilly told The News on Thursday, adding that it was during Argentina's surrender that he witnessed thousands storming the palace in Buenos Aires, trying to kill the country's president, Leopoldo Galtieri.
"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," he said. "That was combat. Soldiers shooting at people who were trying to overthrow the government. I was right in the middle of it."
Neither O'Reilly nor Fox News commented in the Mother Jones piece co-written by David Corn, a commentator for cable news channel MSNBC.
"I'm not going to speak to a guttersnipe like that, and if he wants to put lies out like that I'll counter and disclaim. I want people to know what a liar he is," O'Reilly said about not responding to charges while the article was being written.
Corn, who was a Fox News contributor from March 2001 to March 2008, said that if O'Reilly had made his case to him, "I would have gladly put it in the story. Instead of responding to the substance, he's out there calling names."
