The differences with Williams and O’Reilly
By Jonathan Mahler and Emily Steel, New York Times
Hours after the news broke that Brian Williams had misrepresented his account of a helicopter trip in Iraq, he issued an on-air apology. NBC News started an investigation, and within days had suspended Williams, calling his actions “wrong and completely inappropriate.”
When the magazine Mother Jones reported that Bill O’Reilly had engaged in self-aggrandizing rhetoric about his coverage of the Falklands war, he called one of the authors of the article “an irresponsible guttersnipe” and used his nightly show to fight back against his accusers. His bosses at Fox News, including the chief executive, Roger Ailes, rallied to his defense.
Fox’s handling of the controversy says a lot about the network. It also says a lot about its most visible star, a man who perhaps more than any other has defined the parameters and tenor of Fox News, in the process ushering in a new era of no-holds-barred, intentionally divisive news coverage.
Since dethroning CNN’s Larry King as the king of cable news almost 14 years ago, O’Reilly has helped transform a start-up news channel into a financial juggernaut, with estimated annual profits of more than $1 billion. He and Fox News have risen not on the back of big interviews or high-impact investigations but on the pugnacious brand of conservatism personified by O’Reilly.
There are other differences between the two controversies. The incident at the center of O’Reilly’s occurred more than 30 years ago; Mr. Williams’s happened in 2003. And his accusers are journalists, not military veterans as they were in Williams’s case. But the most meaningful point of distinction — and the reason O’Reilly’s job is almost certainly safe — is that he is not an anchorman, with all of the cultural weight that title carries. He’s a professional provocateur.
The accusations against O’Reilly, which have since been substantiated by other journalists in Argentina at the time, have played neatly into the network’s narrative of being the conservative outlier in an industry dominated by liberals.
Wow NYT, kind of one sided. And I’ve seen both NBC and CBS news support the FOX guy on air. Especially CBS which provided tapes of the war. I expect better NYT, much better journalism.
There seems to be more honesty in the situations that Ron Howard injected Forest Gump into than the situations that Bill O’Reilly seems to have injected himself into. At least in “Forest Gump” no one asserted actual reality of the situations.
Here is another lie that has just surfaced. Bill O’Reilly has lied about being present at the suicide of Lee Harvey Oswald associate George S. de Mohrenschildt. He says he was at de Mohrenschildt’s front door in Florida the instant de Mohrenschild shot himself in March of 1977. He made the claim in his book “Killing Kennedy”. But there is indisputable facts that put him in Dallas at the time of the suicide.
Fair and balanced my grass!
Compared to the endless lies of the Clintons and King Hussein gang that actually affect people in many serious ways this story doesn’t have a lot of importance except to say that some reporters want to be the news and not just report it.
George W Bush and Dick Cheney: Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Nigeria.
Justice, you forgot to bring that one up that cost THOUSANDS of American lives and cost us a trillion dollars.
“The stolen valor act is one of the best laws in ages to combat anyone from lying their way into combat like Hillary and Lying Brian Williams.”
So Justice, above is a comment you made on a story about Brian Williams, yet here on this story you basically give Bill O’Reilly a pass by saying, “this story doesn’t have a lot of importance except to say that some reporters want to be the news and not just report it.” By virtue of today’s statement are you exonerating Brian Williams and retracting your statement about how he should be tried under the Stolen Valor Act? If not, once again your hypocrisy is proven in your written words.
The biggest difference between Bill O’Reilly and Brian Williams is that Williams has reported numerous times throughout the years from active war zones with actual video footage to prove it, whereas O’Reilly has never, ever set foot in an active war zone in his whole career (contrary to his claims in books and on air!).
The Stolen Valor act is a very good law and has been used on a number of frauds it is only a few years old and wouldn’t apply. There is a difference in recent events involving Hillary “under fire” and Williams in “combat” and his false reporting in Katrina and these decades old stories of news reporting that would have been when O’Reilly was at CBS and he was in fact a witness to some dangerous events and the news clips and others prove it. The question is was he reporting in a “War Zone” in a country at war where reporters were being beaten by the Argentine Police? CBS has the story and he was there. This seems to be the issue with liberal media inventing a battle of semantics.
Here’s another 2 differences: Williams is a news reporter and a gentleman. O’Reilly is an opinion pimp and a bully.
Say it isn’t so! ANOTHER Bill O’Reilly lie exposed:
‘Media Matters produced two clips of O’Reilly talking about the murders. During a December 2012 broadcast of “The O’Reilly Factor,” the host recalled describing the atrocity to his mother.
“When I would tell her, hey, mom, I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head, she almost couldn’t process it,” O’Reilly said. “She couldn’t process it, you know.”
O’Reilly didn’t detail when or where in El Salvador he saw those murders.
In a statement to CNNMoney on Wednesday night, O’Reilly said that reporters covering the conflict in El Salvador were shown “depictions of nuns who were murdered.” He noted that his reference to the nuns in 2012 came on the day of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.’
What? Here is a link to an article that lists NINETY NINE more O’Reilly lies:
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/bill-oreilly-long-list-of-lies/?fb=dd