It’s amazing how much he has lied about
by digby
It’s pretty much everything at this point:
One evening in March more than 30 years ago, Gaeton Fonzi received a call from a man whose voice and name are now instantly recognizable.
“Hi Gaeton,” the caller said. “Bill O’Reilly.”
The year was 1977. O’Reilly, a young television reporter in Dallas, was chasing a story about a figure in the investigation of the JFK assassination who had killed himself in Florida.
He was calling Fonzi, a congressional investigator, to confirm the suicide.“You hear anything about it?” O’Reilly asked, according to phone recordings provided to CNN by Gaeton’s widow, Marie Fonzi.
The phone recordings indicate that O’Reilly learned of the suicide second-hand and was in a different location at the time.
Years later, however, O’Reilly would repeatedly claim to have been at the scene.
In his 2012 book “Killing Kennedy,” O’Reilly wrote that he knocked on the door of a South Florida home when suddenly he “heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide” of George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian immigrant who knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
While promoting the book, O’Reilly said on Fox News that he “was about to knock on the door” when de Mohrenschildt “blew his brains out with a shotgun.”
The discrepancies were first reported by JFK researcher Jefferson Morley in 2013. His fact-checking didn’t get much attention at the time, and the low-quality recordings he posted on his website made it difficult to understand what O’Reilly and Fonzi were saying.
Earlier this week, amid scrutiny about how O’Reilly has recounted some of his journalistic exploits, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America drew new attention to Morley’s fact-checking.
CNN then obtained higher-quality recordings from Fonzi’s widow.
In the conversations with Fonzi that night in 1977, O’Reilly never once indicated he was anywhere near the scene of the suicide — much less that he heard the fatal gunshot.
On the call, O’Reilly initially tried to confirm the suicide.
“What’s the story?” O’Reilly asked.
“They don’t know,” Fonzi said.
“Nobody knows,” O’Reilly replied.
O’Reilly can also be heard detailing his travel plans. Although he never said where he was calling from, O’Reilly made it clear where he was not.
“I’m coming down there tomorrow,” he said. “I’m coming to Florida.”
Moments later, he elaborated on his itinerary.
“Now, okay, I’m gonna try to get a night flight out of here, if I can,” O’Reilly told Fonzi. “But I might have to go tomorrow morning. Let me see.”
Fox News declined to comment on the contradiction in O’Reilly’s accounts. The channel referred questions to a spokesperson for Henry Holt, the publisher of O’Reilly’s book.
Earlier this week the publisher said “we fully stand behind Bill O’Reilly.”
“This one passage is immaterial to the story being told by this terrific book and we have no plans to look into this matter,” Henry Holt added.
At what point is it clear that he is not just a bombastic pundit but a pathological liar?
And at what point does Fox have to deal with this? Ever? Isn’t it time for people to start asking the allegedly straight reporters Brett Baier, Ed Henry and Chris Wallace what they think about this?