Thus proving once and for all that Fox News isn’t news
by digby
Guys like Ed Henry and John Roberts must be so proud to have left their former careers to join Fox. I hope the money is worth it.
Another former colleague of Bill O’Reilly has spoken out following allegations that the Fox host embellished his experiences covering the Falklands war for CBS in the 1980s.
Former CBS reporter Charles Krause called O’Reilly’s claims “absurd” in an interview with Media Matters published on Monday.
“I don’t recall him doing any major story that anybody remembers and he was there a very short time,” Krause said, “then he was recalled, I don’t know why.”
Krause said he could not remember any proof of O’Reilly’s claim that he saved a cameraman while being chased by the Argentinian army during a protest in Buenos Aires, nor did he agree with calling the protests “riots.”
He also called O’Reilly’s general characterization of the demonstrations “absurd.”
“That’s absurd because Buenos Aires was Buenos Aires,” Krause told Media Matters. “It was just like it always was, there was very little evidence of the war in Buenos Aires. The war was being fought thousands of miles away.”
“He wasn’t a team player and people thought he was grandstanding, basically,” Krause said.
On Sunday, another former CBS correspondent, Eric Engberg, similarly dismissed O’Reilly’s description of the protests in Buenos Aires to CNN’s Brian Stelter, and took issue with O’Reilly’s attitude.
Engberg became noticeably agitated when CNN showed a clip in which O’Reilly said all his CBS colleagues were hiding in their hotel rooms the night of the protests.
“What he just said is a fabrication, a lie,” Engberg said.
CNN also reported that seven other former CBS colleagues have disputed O’Reilly’s repeated accounts of the protests in Buenos Aires.
Apparently, they’re all lying for some reason.
Sadly, O’Reilly will not suffer much from the unfolding scandal that has CBS news vets all saying he was lying about his “combat” reporting even though he smugly attacked Brian Williams for a much lesser crime. (After all, nobody disputes that Williams was actually in a war zone.) Remember that O’Reilly kept his job after being accused of a level of sexual harrassment so gross that it couldn’t even be accurately reported on regular news. Clearly, the only thing that could possibly dislodge him from Fox is news that he’s secretly been donating money to PETA and Move On.
Fox is not news and has never been news. They aren’t even honest partisans. They are just a scripted “reality” TV show. Fake news, except they don’t admit it. And O’Reilly is their star. I’ll be shocked if he pays even the slightest price for this.
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