Go Ahead and Call Bill O'Reilly What He Is: A Pathological Liar

The Fox News mouthpiece leapt on Brian Williams with a predatory recognition of common weakness

By Jeb Lund March 5, 2015

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/go-ahead-and-call-bill-oreilly-what-he-is-a-pathological-liar-20150305



A good rule of callout culture is to never target someone for the same things you do. No adulterer is more insufferable, after all, than the fire-and-brimstone minister. But when NBC anchor Brian Williams was exposed for fabricating stories of journalistic heroism, poor Bill O'Reilly just couldn't help himself. There was Williams, that prick, garnering widespread acclaim for the kind of stories Bill had already been making up for years.

A real American doesn't tolerate that kind of crap, and Bill O'Reilly is a real American. He has evolved into a post-fact reality, nightly defending a singular nation of fear and confabulation against all enemies foreign and domestic. He is a fiction more palpable than himself, and he can't stop, because it's all he has.

Some of the story is probably familiar to you. O'Reilly has lied high and low during his nearly 19 years at Fox News, but the latest round of scrutiny about his stories began with an article in The Nation questioning whether O'Reilly's reporting aided in covering up a massacre in El Salvador in 1982. Instead of primarily focusing on whether O'Reilly acted as a stooge for murderous conservative policy 14 years before his Fox gig, the media instead latched onto O'Reilly's claims that he'd reported from a leveled town where no one was left alive or dead, when in fact The Nation's article included O'Reilly's CBS footage of a very much not-leveled town with at eight people walking around in the background of his shots.

That article and O'Reilly's pummeling Brian Williams inspired Mother Jones' David Corn and Daniel Schulman to look closely at O'Reilly's other tales of hazardous, daring reportage, including his claims to have been in a "war zone" during the Falklands War. Despite O'Reilly's calling Corn a "despicable guttersnipe" and attempting to handwave away the accusations as a liberal hit job, Corn and Shulman's charges have stuck. The nearest O'Reilly — or any other American reporter — got to the war zone was 1,200 miles, and his fallback assertion that protests he "alone" covered in Buenos Aires constituted one have been debunked multiple times over by O'Reilly's former colleagues. Worse, O'Reilly's own footage contradicts his story that he had a gun pulled on him.