Bill O’Reilly Resorts To Name-Calling And Insults In Response To Mother Jones Story

During the Friday night broadcast of The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly responded to a Mother Jones story showing he embellished his war coverage as a reporter by throwing out personal insults and accusing the magazine and others of being “far left zealots.” The report that Mother Jones published on Thursday showed numerous instances of O’Reilly exaggerating, mischaracterizing or plain not telling the truth about his experiences as a CBS reporter in the early 80s. Throughout the years, he’s claimed he was in a war zone during the Falklands War, people killed during a riot in Buenos Aires and seen atrocities in El Salvador. However, the facts don’t support his claims.

O’Reilly used the bully pulpit of his show Friday night to personally attack Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn and CNN’s Brian Stelter, while bringing up Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), mostly because O’Reilly despises him for writing a book years ago that pointed out many of Bill-O’s lies in the past. (Why not also bring up longtime foe Keith Olbermann while you’re at it, Bill?) The former Inside Edition host provided ‘proof’ that he everything he’s ever said about his coverage was true. The proof — a letter he personally wrote.

Below is video of O’Reilly’s ‘Talking Points’ segment:

O’Reilly is the typical defensive bully. When cornered, due solely to actions of his own making, his only reaction is to lash out and attack. Regarding Corn, he refers to him as a “guttersnipe” and a “far left zealot” whose magazine has low circulation. He also calls Stelter a “far left zealot” who is “masquerading as a journalist.” As for Franken, he just wanted to take some shots at an old enemy, while simultaneously puffing himself up by claiming that those who smear him end up more famous. I guess it was his take on liberal bias in the media or something.

Corn provided an annotated response to O’Reilly’s rant Friday evening, providing point-by-point rebuttals to O’Reilly’s claims. He specifically pointed out that nobody accused O’Reilly of not being in Buenos Aires and getting valuable news coverage during that time. The issue is that O’Reilly has made contradictory and perhaps exaggerated claims about what he saw there as well as stating he had been in a “war zone.” Nothing he showed or said during the broadcast proved anything or refuted the claims made by Corn and Mother Jones. Corn also pointed out that O’Reilly said Corn needs to placed “in the kill zone.” While Fox has asked him to retract and apologize for the statement, O’Reilly has so far refused to do so.

While NBC suspended Brian Williams six moths without pay for his own embellishments, Fox is going to do nothing to O’Reilly. On his show last night, O’Reilly brought on Geraldo Rivera and Bernie Goldberg to circle the wagons and tirelessly defend him. The rest of Fox and the Conservative Entertainment Complex has also shown early on that they have Bill-O’s back. The same group of pundits, commentators and ‘journalists’ who called for Williams’ head once again reveal themselves to be blatant hypocrites.

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Justin Baragona

Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site's (@PoliticusSports).

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