Earlier this month, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted that he had lied about being in a helicopter that got show down while he was covering the war in Iraq. Some people freaked out, NBC suspended him for six months, and then everyone moved on with their lives. Well, everyone except for other TV news hosts, who see Williams’ fib as an affront to all that they hold dear—and also a good way to get some sweet, sweet ratings. One of Williams’ strongest/loudest critics has been Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly—at least to the extent that he’s not already the strongest/loudest critic of everything ever. As reported Mediaite, O’Reilly said that the majority of American news outlets are corrupt, and that they need to “begin telling the truth without an agenda.” Powerful words, straight from Fox News.
Then, liberal rag Mother Jones came along and decided to take a look at some of O’Reilly’s own heroic war stories to see if they hold up any better than Williams’. According to the article that Mother Jones’ David Corn and Daniel Schulman put together, they absolutely do not. Titled “Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem,” the piece examines a bunch of claims that O’Reilly has made about supposedly experiencing combat during the 1982 Falklands war between the United Kingdom and Argentina. We won’t go into the whole thing, but based on Mother Jones’ evidence, O’Reilly has been using stories of the incredible things he saw and did in the Falklands to make himself sound more awesome for years. The problem is that no American journalists were allowed into the war zone, so O’Reilly’s stories almost certainly must have been embellished, and if that’s the case, he’s guilty of the exact same thing that Williams is guilty of.
Unsurprisingly, O’Reilly didn’t take too kindly to these accusations, and—as reported by The Wrap—he declared that David Corn deserves to “be in the kill zone.” We’re not sure what that means, but it definitely sounds like a reasonable to say. Weirdly, though, Mother Jones didn’t think it was so reasonable, and it released a statement demanding that O’Reilly apologize on the air for suggesting that Corn should die.
Even more unsurprisingly, O’Reilly did not apologize to Corn on his show tonight. Instead, he continued to accuse of Corn of lying and of being out to get him. Rather than announce that O’Reilly should be killed, Corn took the “Talking Points Memo” section of O’Reilly’s show and countered each of his points with evidence that was brought up in the earlier article. Again, we won’t go into the whole thing, but it definitely proves that neither O’Reilly or Mother Jones have any interest in backing down. Bill O’Reilly is going to keep telling his critics that they should “be in the kill zone,” and his critics are going to keep telling him that the kill zone was actually a thousand miles away from him.