Bill O’Reilly’s Argentina story challenged by ex-CBS News journalist

By Erik Wemple February 21 at 5:17 PM

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly did his utmost at week’s end to discredit a Mother Jones story on his alleged embellishments of his reporting from Argentina in 1982. After the story by David Corn and Daniel Schulman hit the Internet on Thursday afternoon, the famous TV personality spent hours on the phone with reporters blasting it. “David Corn is a guttersnipe liar,” O’Reilly told this blog. And on his show last night, he repeated the attacks.

The apparent goal of O’Reilly’s frenzy was to keep the story from breaking into the next week.

A Facebook posting by a former CBS News correspondent, however, appears likely to keep the questions flowing toward the O’Reilly camp. An extensive rant by Eric Jon Engberg, who served as a CBS News correspondent for 27 years, calls into question several of O’Reilly’s statements about the reporting — and O’Reilly’s subsequent recollections of it.

To establish his bona fides in fact-checking O’Reilly, Engberg notes, “I can provide some eyewitness information on this matter because I was one of the correspondents in Buenos Aires with O’Reilly and the rest of the rather large staff of CBS News people who were there ‘covering’ the war,” writes Engberg, noting that he and other U.S. correspondents were hundreds of miles away from the battles of the Falkland Islands war, between the United Kingdom and Argentina. For a sample of Engberg’s reporting on the conflict, click here.

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