What does it take to cause Swill O’Really to call you
a “far-left assassin,” “disgusting piece of garbage,” and a
“guttersnipe liar”?
Quoting his own words back to him and asking for clarification. Followed up with more colorful language like, “(V)erify what I’m saying, because it’s easily verifiable, then I expect David Corn to be in the kill zone.”
When asked why the Faux News hack did not respond to
questions from Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief and slayer of liars
David Corn, O’Really blasted:
“Because David Corn is a guttersnipe liar,” O’Reialy told the Erik Wemple Blog tonight. “Is that clear enough? For years he’s been trying to get Faux News. I would never speak to the man about anything at any time. He’s a disgusting piece of garbage.”
This doesn’t answer the question. This points
fingers at Corn – with no facts, by the way – and dodges the questions.
The questions Corn asked were not unfair. They were based on quotes by
O’Really himself.
Instead of examining the quotes, the media is doing the he said/she said thing that’s ruining our political process. Here’s some of the research done by the team of David Corn and Daniel Schulman at Mother Jones
(my bold and my comments in parentheses, in order to demonstrate that
it’s not hard to determine if what O’Really has claimed is accurate or
not):
• In his 2001 book, The No Spin Zone: Confrontations With the Powerful and Famous in America, O’Reilly stated, “You know that I am not easily shocked. I’ve reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands.” (This is not true, and “on the ground” disputes O’Really’s claims that he was referring to covering the Falklands War from 1,000 miles away.)
• Wingnut hack Tucker Carlson, in a 2003 book, described how O’Really answered a question during a Washington panel discussion about media coverage of the Afghanistan war: “Rather than simply answer the question, O’Really began by trying to establish his own bona fides as a war correspondent. ‘I’ve covered wars, okay? I’ve been there. The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Middle East. I’ve almost been killed three times, okay.'” (Nope. The Falklands are 1,000 miles away from where O’Really and the rest of the CBS crew were.)
• In a 2004 column about US soldiers fighting in Iraq, O’Reialy noted, “Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash.” (OK, this one is a stretch but could pass if by “combat situation” he means combat-like, but if Hillary Clinton said this, Faux News would hyperventilate in outrage.)
• In 2008, he took a shot at journalist Bill Moyers, saying, “I missed Moyers in the war zones of [the] Falkland conflict in Argentina, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. I looked for Bill, but I didn’t see him.” (That’s probably because you weren’t there, Bill O’Really. Just sayin’.)
And here is where O’Really gets detailed and claims
to be in the actual Falklands according to a quote gathered by Mother
Jones from April 2013, “I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in
Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then
hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the
army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off,
you know, but at the same time, I’m looking around and trying to do my
job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was
more important.”
The Mother Jones article has many, many more quotes.
Quotes that make Brian Williams’ memories look like a tape recorder.
O’Reialy loves to present himself falsely as a war correspondent who’s
been in the middle of combat. (This might explain the wingnuts' love of
war.)
O’Really has repeatedly described a protest in
Buenos Aires as “combat” and has used it as proof of his war
correspondent bona fides. A protest scene, scary or not, is not the same
thing as a war combat zone.
We are, as humans, prone to embellishment and story
telling. But if you describe your job as being a “truth teller”, and as a
journalist you understand the importance of accuracy (the more accurate
we try to be about reality the cleaner our perceptions and conclusions
tend to be), you don’t conflate being frightened by tear gas in a
protest with being in an actual war combat zone. It’s even more bizarre
to do this as someone claiming to respect our troops. (This does bring
up an interesting point in that by O’Really’s own standards, Occupy
protesters can claim to have been in “combat”.)
The media so far is not giving O’Really the Brian
Williams treatment. The same people who fell repeatedly for James
O’Keefe’s edited videos are not biting at a searing expose by the King
of Actual Video (Corn is the person who published the Mitt Romney 47%
tape).
It isn’t that once right always right, it’s that
Corn has a history of being careful and accurate. O’Really does not.
James O’Keefe did not. Discernment is worth something and should be
employed. No wingnut 'journalists' are careful and accurate.
But Corn is.
Faux News has long benefited from special treatment
by the mainstream media due to its long arm of power. They’re in the
club. The real club. The big, corporate, global club. This is why when
the Obama White House scoffed that Faux News was not news, the media were
outraged and circled the wagons around the cable network that had sued
for the right to lie and call it news.
This might be why the media is trying hard to pretend they don’t see the increasingly heavy smoke billowing over Swill O’Really.
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