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Deadline.com; NY Times

Bill O’Reilly Says He Wants Controversy About His Reporting on Falklands War to End, But Then He Tells a New York Times Reporter ‘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.’

Feb 24, 2015  •  Post A Comment

“Hours after Bill O’Reilly again defended his characterization of his reporting from Buenos Aires in 1982 with broadcast excerpts of CBS News’ coverage of the protests there at the end of the Falklands War, and told viewers ‘I want to stop this now. I hope we can stop it,’ The New York Times took him in another direction, reports our good friend Lisa de Moraes at Deadline.com.

The story also says, “Not long after ‘The O’Reilly Factor’ telecast, NYT published an article about how O’Reilly and Fox News had ‘redouble[d] defense of his Falklands reporting.’ Paragraph [six] of that article said: ‘Mr. O’Reilly’s efforts to refute the claims by Mother Jones and some former CBS News colleagues occurred both on the air and off on Monday. 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.”’”

 

2 Comments

  1. I was not there and only know what I’ve read across several sources.

    What is obvious to me is that while Mr. O’Reilly has a right to, and should, defend the truth of the matter, when he wields a threat, he weakens his position whether the truth sustains him or not.

  2. The unfortunate thing about the average person is when they have been wrongly accused of something they have no way of getting their side of the story out. People tend to remember the initial headline; they don’t remember the retraction stuck in a little box in the bottom corner of page 5. For the average person, If we are wrongly accused of something, we have little chance of clearing our name in the court of public opinion. People tend to only remember the accuser’s story. Years from now, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people that remember this story will only remember the Mother Jones article, not the well documented rebuttal from Mr. O’Reilly.

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