Another US anchor accused of false claims: Report
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has been accused of lying about his battleground experience less than two weeks after NBC's Brian Williams stepped down temporarily over his lies about Iraq war in 2003.
On February 14, Brian Williams, confessed that he had embellished an account of the 2003 incident in which he said he was in a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire.
"I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago," he said. "I want to apologize. I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] fire. I was instead in a following aircraft."
On Thursday, Mother Jones published an article showing that O'Reilly has been falsely claiming for years that he acted heroically during a war that he’d never been to.
O'Reilly said he worked as a correspondent during the Falklands war and that he was in 1982 England-Argentina conflict, the article said.
The top-rated cable news anchor has often said that he can perceive war as only someone who had witnessed and experienced it, according to Mother Jones.
"I've been there. That's really what separates me from most of these other bloviators. I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I've seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven't," O'Reilly said.
In his 2001 book, The No Spin Zone: Confrontations With the Powerful and Famous in America, O'Reilly stated that he had been to the battleground and reported news from “active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands."
In a 2004 column on US soldiers fighting in Iraq, he said he is aware of life-and-death decisions “made in a flash," because he managed to survive a war situation in Argentina during the Falklands war.
However, in his 2001 book, The No Spin Zone, O'Reilly said he had arrived in Buenos Aires soon before the Argentina surrendered to the British which put an end to the 10-week war over controlling two territories far off the coast of Argentina.
He neither provided references to his experience in the fighting between British and Argentine military forces nor said he was anywhere close to the Falkland Islands.
In fact, the war zone was in a very remote location, over 1,400 miles offshore, which meant that few reporters could go there to witness the combat.
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