PDA

View Full Version : Fox News forced to backtrack again over Bill O'Reilly's reporting claims




twomp
03-02-2015, 01:07 PM
Fox News has admitted, in answer to questions from the Washington Post, that host Bill O’Reilly did not witness any bombings in Northern Ireland or murders in El Salvador. The network said he saw only photographs of such atrocities.

For more than a week, Fox defended O’Reilly from increasing accusations that he has for years exaggerated elements of his reporting. O’Reilly called such accusations “bullshit” and made vague threats against reporters who do not satisfy his demands about their own reporting.

The story took on increased relevancy after NBC suspended the Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, over inconsistencies in his version of events in Iraq in 2003 and around Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The new Fox statement is the second time either Fox or O’Reilly has backtracked on such issues.

O’Reilly claimed in a broadcast to have taken part in “a raid” in Ireland, and in a 2013 book, Keep It Pithy, wrote that he had seen “Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs”.

O’Reilly did not see any bombings or injuries but only saw photographs provided to reporters by police, a Fox spokesperson told the Post.

Last week, O’Reilly qualified his claims of having seen four nuns murdered in El Salvador in 1980, during that country’s civil war. O’Reilly had said he saw “guys gun down nuns in El Salvador” and “nuns get shot in the back of the head”. He now says he was among “reporters [who were] shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast”.

O’Reilly was forced to concede that point to the liberal media watchdog Mediaite, which pointed out that the nuns were murdered in December 1980 and that O’Reilly did not travel to El Salvador until he became a CBS correspondent in 1981.



LOL!

read the rest here:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/02/fox-news-bill-o-reilly-reports