ONCE AGAIN, BILL O’REILLY IS HIS OWN WORST ENEMY

                                                        

 

Both Fox and Bill O’Reilly continue to offer their made-up stories as “real news”.

 

Good ole Bill O’Reilly, of Fox’s, O’REILLY FACTOR, continues to have a really bad month.

It all started with his stories about his heroic time as a globetrotting reporter covering war zones.  These have turned out to be mostly fabrications mixed with half-truths.

 

Now, his story about the time he personally heard the gunshot that killed a mysterious figure at the center of the John F. Kennedy assassination plot, that too is coming to pieces right before all of our eyes.

First though, O’Reilly has continued his loud attacks on Mother Jones’, Washngton Bureau Chief,  David Corn, even after at least seven former CBS colleagues have come forward, with varying degrees of outrage.  All have backed up Corn’s reporting and dispute of O’Reilly’s accounts of his time in the Falklands “war zone”.  And all of the CBS individuals have made it clear that O’Reilly’s only responsibility was covering political demonstrations in Buenos Aires, which was 1,200 miles away from the Falklands war.

When Corn’s Falkland story was about to appear in the New York Times, O’Reilly then publically went after the Times reporter, Emily Steel.  In typical O’Reilly fashion, he threatened Ms. Steel, telling her in a phone interview that if he didn’t find her story fair, “I am coming after you with everything I have.” And just in case Ms. Steel was confused about his meaning, O’Reilly added: “You can take that as a threat.”

Social media has gone wild over O’Reilly’s threat, but the Fox chairman, Roger Ailes, personally described all New York Times reporters as “a bunch of lying scum”.  So don’t expect Ailes to come to Emily Steel’s defense any time soon.  ( I find it highly ironic that the head of Fox News has the gall to call the New York Times reporters, “a bunch of lying scum”.  A classic case of the pot calling the kettle black! )

But Bill’s problems haven’t stopped there.  And with someone like O’Reilly, who has an ego the size of Texas, when the problem with his JFK assassination plot went public, O’Reilly went ballistic.

In the JFK assassination issue, rather than simply saying that he had reported on the tragedy and the mystery surrounding JFK’s death, O’Reilly needed to be an active participant in the story. In short, he broke the #1 basic rule of being a good reporter: He made himself the focus of the story.

In O’Reilly’s non-fiction book, Killing Kennedy, he wrote the following about the Russian that had befriended Lee Harvey Oswald and was to testify before the congressional investigating committee.  This is now coming back to haunt O’Reilly:

“In March of 1977, a young television reporter at WFAA in Dallas began looking into the Kennedy assassination.  As part of his reporting, he sought an interview with the shadowy Russian college professor who had befriended the Oswald’s upon their arrival in Dallas in 1962.  The reporter traced George de Mohrenschildt to Palm Beach, Florida, and traveled there to confront him.  At the time, de Mohrenschildt had been called to testify before a congressional committee looking into the event in November 1963.  As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood.  By the way, that reporter is Bill O’Reilly”

There are now numerous pieces of evidence that contradict O’Reilly’s claim that he “heard the shotgun blast” of the suicide shot that killed de Mohrenschildt. 

In recent comments to Media Matters, two of O’Reilly’s former colleagues at WFAA say that his version of events is a total lie. 

 

“Bill O’Reilly’s a phony, there’s no other way to put it,” said Tracy Rowlett.  Rowlett is a former WFAA reporter and TV anchor who worked at the station with O’Reilly. “He was not up on the porch when he heard the gunshots, he was in Dallas. He wasn’t traveling at that time.”

Byron Harris, a reporter at WFAA for the past 40 years, agreed that O’Reilly had not traveled to Florida for the story and accused O’Reilly of stealing the report on de Mohrenschildt’s suicide from a local newspaper.  According to Mr. Harris, O’Reilly “…was in Dallas. He stole that article out of the newspaper. I guarantee that Channel 8 [WFAA] didn’t send him to Florida to do that story because it was a newspaper story, it was broken by the Dallas Morning News.”



Don’t be surprised if you start hearing of O’Reilly going after a host of those that criticize him or that call him a liar. 

 

O’Reilly is well known for sending his so called “producer” Jesse Watters out to menace reporters, or anyone who displeases him. Amanda Terkel, Senior Politics Managing Editor at The Huffington Post, has told her story in a televised interview of being stalked, harassed and ambushed by O’Reilly’s producer Watters, and there are a number of similar stories out there.

It will be interesting to see how O’Reilly handles all the news about him over the coming weeks. Since being exposed as a serial “story fabrication specialist”, this Fox host has acted with a stunning lack of tact.  He continues to go on tirades, accuses the liberal media of conspiring against him, and he even threatens a New York Times reporter if she writes anything bad about him.

Unfortunately for Mr. O’Reilly, it’s appearing that these tactics are nothing more than the desperate cries of a Fox host with a guilty conscience.

Copyright G.Ater  2015