Bill O’Reilly’s Argentina story challenged by ex-CBS News journalist
Source: Washington Post
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.
(...)
Engberg: “The only place where such an injury could have occurred was the relatively tame riot I have described above. Neither [Larry] Doyle, who would have been immediately informed of injury to any CBS personnel, nor anyone else who was working the story remembers a cameraman being injured that night. No one who reported back to our hotel newsroom after the disturbance was injured; if a cameraman had been ‘bleeding from the ear’ he would have immediately reported that to his superiors at the hotel.” This allegation on O’Reilly’s part, alleges Engberg, is “not credible without further confirmation.” Further, he calls on O’Reilly to identify the cameraman as a way of allowing the vetting of the story.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/02/21/bill-oreillys-argentina-story-challenged-by-ex-cbs-news-journalist/
Engberg's original piece on FB (you need to log in to read):
https://www.facebook.com/eric.j.engberg?fref=nf&pnref=story
Here's hoping this story grows legs. BillO needs suspended, if FOX has anywhere near the standards NBC does (bit let's not kid ourselves)
= new reply since forum marked as read
