Brian Williams - why lie?

I find it interesting that I have read opinions that vary all the way from Williams is a great journalist to that he is not a journalist at all. I dont know as I have not paid much attention to his work.

Intellectual curiosity is not necessarily everyone's strength. That's why God made Fox, because thinking or reflection can give you a brain cramp.

CBS News releases video referenced in O'Reilly dispute
Source: AP

NEW YORK (AP) — CBS News on Monday released video from four stories it aired about the Falklands War in 1982, all part of a dispute involving Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly and his subsequent statements about covering the war.

None of the stories mention O'Reilly, then a young CBS reporter, or makes any specific reference to a CBS crew member being hurt.

The television time travel was prompted by a Mother Jones article last week calling into question O'Reilly claims that he reported in a "war zone" or "combat zone" during the brief conflict between Britain and Argentina. Few reporters made it to the front of the war, some 1,000 miles from the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires.

O'Reilly has said that he covered an anti-government demonstration in Buenos Aires that turned violent and that a photographer he was working with was knocked to the ground and was bleeding. Describing the events two years ago, O'Reilly said he "dragged off" the photographer from danger.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/590e34e590aa409b9585b9486cb4489d/cbs-news-releases-video-referenced-oreilly-dispute

O'Reilly is not a journalist and no one gives a **** what he did in 1983.

And by the way the Williams story is not about politics, it is about the corrosive effects of the corporate class, the bankruptcy of the elite, and the decline of journalism.

Bill O'Reilly about Falkland-controversy: "I want to stop this now. I hope we can stop it."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/cbs-releases-falklands-protest-footage-bill-oreilly

Excerpts:

"CBS News today posted its reports from Buenos Aires at the end of the Falklands war, in response to a request from Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who has been seeking to counter reports that he mischaracterized his wartime reporting experience. But rather than bolstering O'Reilly's description of the anti-government protest he says he covered as a "combat situation," the tape corroborates the accounts of other journalists who were there and who have described it as simply a chaotic, violent protest."

...

"They say tear gas was deployed; police clubbed people with nightsticks and fired rubber bullets; reporters were assaulted by demonstrators and by police; and a photojournalist was wounded in the legs by gunfire. But these media accounts did not report, as O'Reilly claims, that there were fatalities."

...

"The footage captured a dramatic clash—including a shot of a protester, apparently injured, lying on the ground—but none of this footage shows Argentine military or police firing into the crowd with live ammunition and killing civilians."

...

"As he showed the CBS footage on his show, O'Reilly claimed that unidentified local media sources had reported fatalities. "We don't know how many deaths," he remarked. And he insisted, "I told it exactly the way it was." Referring to the controversy about his Falklands claims, he said, "I want to stop this now. I hope we can stop it.""

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/02/23/liberals-want-brian-williams-fired/

That is certainly the view of the MEGACORPS who own the media outlets where journalism is supposed to be going on, Back in the day though the owners viewed the news hour as public service towards good citizenship, they were willing to make little or no money on it because for that few hours a week they were earning the right to be shills in everything else they did. First the MEGACORPS said " we want to make money on news", then they said " we should have these folks be entertainers rather than journalists, because that will make more money".

Bill O’Reilly CAUGHT IN ANOTHER LIE, And It’s His Most Embarrassing One Yet

Bill O’Reilly is having a really bad month. First, his well-worn stories about his heroic time as a globetrotting reporter covering war zones turned out to be mostly fabrications mixed with half-truths. Now, his cherished story about the time he personally heard the gunshot that killed a mysterious figure at the center of the John F. Kennedy assassination plot is coming to pieces right before his eyes. It should come as no surprise, but it’s worth noting that O’Reilly has a massive ego. And like all truly egomaniac blowhards, O’Reilly needs a steady fuel of tall-tales and trumped up stories to feed and placate that inflated sense of importance. To that end, O’Reilly has continually used his platform as a right-wing celebrity to interject himself into stories that he was, at most, on the sidelines for. Take for instance, his insistence that he was in the Falklands and had to save a fellow journalist from peril while the army marched toward them. Most journalists would be content to say they “covered” the war (in this case 1,000 miles away in Buenos Aires), but O’Reilly had to make sure people thought he was actually in the middle of the fighting.


And the same goes for his coverage of the JFK assassination. Rather than simply take pride in the fact that he reported on the tragedy, intrigue, and mystery surrounding JFK’s death, O’Reilly needed to be an active participant in the story. In short, he broke the cardinal rule of reporting: He made himself the focus. Here is a (unintentionally hilarious) excerpt pulled from O’Reilly’s best-selling non-fiction book Killing Kennedy in which he devotes an entire passage to his time personally hearing the gunshot that killed a friend of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s by the name of George de Mohrenschildt.


Besides being written in the format of a chain email you received from a relative, the story is almost surely a fabrication of O’Reilly’s. Suspicions regarding the claims began almost at the outset of the book’s publication, however in recent days Media Matters broke the story wide open with a hard look at the facts. What they found doesn’t look good for O’Reilly.


Numerous pieces of evidence contradict O’Reilly’s claim that he “heard the shotgun blast” that killed de Mohrenschildt.

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

“Bill O’Reilly’s a phony, there’s no other way to put it,” said Tracy Rowlett, a former WFAA reporter and 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 s,the past 40 year agreed that O’Reilly had not traveled to Florida for the story and accused him of stealing his reporting on de Mohrenschildt’s suicide from a newspaper.

According to Harris, O’Reilly “was in Dallas. He stole that article out of the newspaper. I guarantee Channel 8 didn’t send him to Florida to do that story because it was a newspaper story, it was broken by the Dallas Morning News.”

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/02/24/oreilly-lied-about-suicide-of-jfk-assassination/202655

As with the Falklands lies, O’Reilly seems to believe he exists on some higher dimensional plane where distances – say, from Dallas, Texas to Palm Beach, Florida – are meaningless. At once, O’Reilly can be in his office in Dallas while also standing on the porch of Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s house. Or he just made it up.



http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/02/24/bill-oreilly-caught-in-another-lie-and-its-his-most-embarrassing-one-yet/

No wonder Bill O'Reilly is threatening reporters...

An excellent question from @DavidCornDC.


https://twitter.com/HGTomato/status/570224400303312896




p.s. i am running out of popcorn...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/02/24/oreilly-new-york-times-falklands/23922989/

O'Reilly Lied About Suicide Of JFK Assassination Figure, Former Colleagues Say
Source: Media Matters



George de Mohrenschildt was a Russian emigre who befriended Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and testified before the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. On March 29, 1977, the same day he was contacted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he committed suicide at his daughter's home in Florida. At the time, O'Reilly was a reporter for Dallas' WFAA-TV who regularly reported on stories related to the Kennedy assassination.

O'Reilly has bizarrely inserted himself into de Mohrenschildt's story, claiming in books and on Fox News that he was outside the house seeking to interview de Mohrenschiltd at the time of his death. O'Reilly is under heavy criticism and scrutiny for his false claims about his 1982 Falklands War reporting.

O'Reilly's implausible tale was first flagged by Jefferson Morley in a 2013 post for his website JFKFacts.org. Morley has worked as an editor for The Washington Post, Salon.com, and Arms Control Today, and is a visiting professor at the University of California, Washington Center.

New interviews with former O'Reilly colleagues who say he wasn't in Florida on the day of de Mohrenschildt's suicide and documents obtained by Media Matters bolster Morley's reporting.

Read more: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/02/24/oreilly-lied-about-suicide-of-jfk-assassination/202655


Looks like it's way past time for an internal investigation, if FOX had the journalism standards of NBC.

But we know that will never happen.

Former CBS newsman Engberg hits back at a O'Reilly in new rebuttal 2/24
Just posted on Facebook a few hours ago:

Last night Bill O'Reilly presented his on-air grand rejoinder to declarations by a dozen newsmen, including myself, that his portrayal in interviews and publications of a street riot he covered in Buenos Aires at the end of the Falklands War as dangerous "combat" was muzzy hokum. I'm afraid his carefully plotted defense raised more questions than it answered about O'Reilly's moment in the "War Zone."

With his usual car salesman's flourish, O'Reilly played for viewers excerpts of the 1982 reports carried on the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather" the day after the disturbance in question. It was excellent, dramatic footage of a riot. It should be. The CBS Buenos Aires camera crews were among the best I ever saw. The report on the show, as is always the case with a network story, was a fusion of the most outstanding pictures taken by all the cameramen who were working on the story, in this case five in number. What the completed story thus showed was a speeded-up version of the actual event -- kind of like a "Sports Center" re-cap of one night's Major League baseball action. I think everyone understands that. No doubt it was a scary event. But it was over in two hours and everyone went home. Furthermore, the video of people chanting, police firing tear gas and arresting demonstrators is not "combat," and a reporter who is on the scene is not a "war correspondent." Not even close.
While we're on the subject of reporters who were on the scene, one of the voices heard on the CBS tape played by O'Reilly was my own. Why was I included in the story? Because I had covered the riot. Strong evidence, I suggest that O'Reilly's claim to being alone on the story because the rest of the CBS correspondent corps was hiding in their hotel rooms out of fear is bunk. Why would he say such a thing if untrue? Because he'll say anything to advance his own agenda. He also hates network correspondents because he couldn't be one.

More important, the CBS video he showed -- and remember this tape included the most newsworthy, exciting pictures from five camera crews -- does not show troops firing guns into the crowd or the bodies of dead and wounded on the ground. O'Reilly has repeatedly said he saw such firing, a claim denied by a score of real journalists who were there. Not even the Buenos Aires tabloid press, which had a reputation for hyping everything, claimed that troops had fired into crowds. O'Reilly is all alone on this issue. The video undercut rather than supported his claims.

After showing the 33-year old video, O'Reilly next produced his key witness, Don Brown, the NBC executive in charge of Latin American coverage at the time of the Falklands War and the riot which O'Reilly is trying to inflate into a case of "combat." Brown, interviewed by phone, proceeded to display a colossal ignorance of events that unfolded inside Argentina at the end of the Falklands war. His comments appeared to be tailored to make O'Reilly look like a reporter serving in a "war-like zone." But it seemed obvious to me that Brown had not been in the country at the time. No one could be so ill-informed otherwise. "As the war went badly," he said, "there were demonstrations every day. There were tanks in the street." Wrong on both counts. Especially on the tanks. "As the military were losing badly," Brown intoned, "the populace began to turn on the military leadership." Nothing like that happened. There wasn't a reaction to losing the war until it was lost. Brown hadn't even checked Wikipedia or Youtube.



Read the rest at:
https://www.facebook.com/eric.j.engberg/posts/10204901509874849

Bill O’Reilly Threatened a female New York Times Reporter Over His ‘War Zone’ Controversy

Rather than apologizing and laying low, O'Reilly has lashed out various journalists covering the controversy, and now he's reportedly threatened a reporter from the New York Times.

The Times reported on Monday night:

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.”

Emily Steel, who co-authored the story with Ravi Somaiya, confirmed on Twitter that O'Reilly was speaking to her.

This is his most high-profile attack in recent days, but it's far from his first. Mother Jones broke the news that O'Reilly has repeatedly said he reported from a "war zone" and a "combat situation" during the 1982 conflict, while he was actually covering a related protest in Buenos Aires, which is more than a thousand miles from the Falklands. Friday night on The O'Reilly Factor, the host said Mother Jones is "considered by many the bottom rung of journalism in America," and called the story's co-author, David Corn, a "guttersnipe" and a "liar." He also declared that Brian Stelter, who dared pick up the story, "is another far left zealot ... masquerading as a journalist. CNN can do a lot better than this guy."


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/bill-oreilly-threatens-new-york-times-reporter.html

Bill O'Reilly Once WROTE A WILD STORY About The Incident At The Center Of His Scandal


~snip~

O'Reilly's book was titled "Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Murder and Television." It is clearly a work of fiction, but several critics have pointed out the central characters bear a clear resemblance to O'Reilly. In 2004, the late Michael Hastings said the book offers "an inside view of the author’s mind." The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann described the main characters as two versions of O'Reilly's "alter ego." One of those characters is Shannon Michaels, who like O'Reilly, is a tall, Irish-American journalist who was sent to cover the Falklands War for a television network. The protest is a life-changing moment for Michaels where, as he puts it, he "almost got killed." In O'Reilly's story, Michaels is on the scene reporting for the fictional network GNN on June 15, 1982 when thousands of Argentines angry over the surrender rioted in front of the president's residence, La Casa Rosada. O'Reilly has said he was also there reporting for CBS News, but his accounts of the protest have been disputed. O'Reilly has described his experience covering the aftermath of the Falklands conflict as being in a "war zone" and "combat situation."[/b>] He has also said "many were killed" at the protest and that his cameraman was injured. These claims were disputed by a series of reports in Mother Jones and several of his former colleagues who have said no one was killed and no CBS staff was injured.


In O'Reilly's novel the protest was broken up by soldiers, or as the author put it, "combat-ready shock troops dressed in full battle gear and armed with machine guns." At this point, Michaels, one of the characters described as O'Reilly's fictional "alter ego" realized he "had to get away" with his cameraman and soundman. As Michaels and his crew escaped, the soldiers let loose on the crowd. "Without warning, they began firing directly into the crowd," O'Reilly wrote, adding, "Hundreds of people immediately fell onto the cement." O'Reilly wrote that Michaels "saw one man take a bullet squarely in the right eye" and he "was killed instantly." He described "ten thousand tightly packed demonstrators ... desperately trying to get away from the gunfire any way they could." These scenes written by O'Reilly contradict contemporaneous reports of the real-life protest, which do not describe widespread gunfire or any deaths. At this point in O'Reilly's tale, Michaels' cameraman and soundman, "Francisco" and "Juan" are knocked down by "a pack of fleeing young men." Michaels comes to their rescue by "fighting his way through the panicked mob." After their rescue, the two men are concerned with retrieving an expensive camera they dropped in the melee. "**** the camera, it's gone. Get moving," Michaels declared. Juan resists Michaels' order leading the heroic journalist to hit him with what O'Reilly described as a "murderous" look and an order to, "Get the **** out of here Juan." "The soundman finally got the message and moved out," O'Reilly wrote.


O'Reilly's story continued with Michaels carrying his injured cameraman away amid "gunfire and screams." As they escaped. Michaels noticed his colleague was bleeding badly and needed to get to a doctor. This was no simple task in O'Reilly's fictionalized version of the protest. "Movement of any kind would not be easy," O'Reilly wrote, continuing, "The crowd was in complete disarray. Scores of dead and wounded lay on the cold concrete." This scene echoed O'Reilly's claim a CBS cameraman was injured, which has been disputed by his colleagues. In O'Reilly's novel, before Michaels and his were able to escape, they faced two more life-threatening obstacles. Michaels was involved in a tense standoff with a soldier who had "an M-16 pointed directly at his head." Just as they were about to drive off they were also stopped by a secret policeman who attempted to take their tapes. Michaels eliminated the threat by knocking out the secret policeman with a punch O'Reilly described as guided by "pure instinct" and "pure adrenaline" that was fueled by the "violence" he "had just experienced." The protest is pivotal in O'Reilly's novel. After the dramatic escape, a colleague attempted to take Michaels' notes and tapes from the protest. This causes Michaels to have a violent outburst that leads to him getting ousted from the network. Michaels' rage at his co-workers who try to take credit for his Falklands reporting is reminiscent of claims the real-life O'Reilly has made about his experiences in Argentina. O'Reilly has implied other CBS reporters were not on the ground covering the protest, another claim which has been disputed.


You can read Bill O'Reilly's fictionalized version of the protest, which is on page 17 through 25 of his book, here.


cont'


http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-oreillys-wild-story-about-the-falklands-war-2015-2?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+(Business+Insider)

Not from the Onion, "Bill O'Reilly to Produce Historical TV Series Legends & Lies"
http://www.billoreilly.com/b/Bill-OReilly-to-Produce-Historical-TV-Series-emLegends--Lies/em/930730224724694725.html


FOX NEWS CHANNEL TO DEBUT 10-WEEK RUN OF HISTORICAL EPISODIC SPECIALS LEGENDS & LIES ON SUNDAY, APRIL 12th

Executive Produced by FNC’s Bill O’Reilly

**********
I wonder how fast this project gets **** canned?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-kalb/brian-williams-doesnt-des_b_6729368.html

BINGO!

The networks are not in business to serve the public...or to meet the demands of "Freedom of the Press."

In this cockamamie, unfettered capitalistic system of ours...the networks MAJOR goal (maybe even its ONLY goal) is to make as big a profit as possible.

If entertainers help them do that better than journalists...they will use entertainers.

Unless crap like this happens.
Big Profits or Journalistic Integrity---CHOOSE ONE.

If you are asking me which I think they would choose...

...I would guess "big profits" every time.

I might be wrong, FM.

I might be wrong.