The statement was made by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, in regard to the controversy surrounding Fox News Anchor Bill O’Reilly. He went on to say: “They actually want the controversy because it fits this strategy.”
Mr. O’Reilly has been forced to explain the inconsistencies in his explanations regarding his Memoirs; or rather the inconsistencies in his 2001 book, “The No Spin Zone: Confrontations With the Powerful and Famous in America” and his explanation of the events surrounding Rio at the time of the 1982 Falklands War.
Fox News are aggressively defending their Anchor, while a short-while back NBC News suspended their anchor Brian Williams for six months without pay after an investigation revealed he had have falsified a story about being on a helicopter that was shot down in Iraq in 2003.
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nytimes.com reports :
Mr. O’Reilly has said that he had never claimed he reported from the Falkland Islands, where the fighting occurred. “I said I covered the Falklands war, which I did,” he said last Friday. He went on to describe his coverage of protests in the aftermath of the war on the streets of Buenos Aires, some 1,200 miles from the Falklands.
On Monday’s show, Mr. O’Reilly played CBS News footage from 1982 that showed the violent protests and quoted other correspondents describing the scene. He also included an interview with Don Browne, a former NBC News bureau chief who oversaw coverage of Latin America, who said there were tanks on the streets of the Argentine capital. “It was a real country at war,” Mr. Browne said. “It was a very intense situation where people got hurt.”
Mr. O’Reilly’s efforts to refute the claims by Mother Jones and some former CBS News colleagues occurred both on the air and off on Monday. During a phone conversation, he told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter’s coverage was inappropriate. “I am coming after you with everything I have,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “You can take it as a threat.”
David Corn, one of the reporters on the Mother Jones piece, said that the issue was not whether Mr. O’Reilly had reported on a violent protest, but whether Mr. O’Reilly had reported from a war zone.
