Fox News star anchorman Bill O’Reilly made himself available to news outlets large and small Thursday in an aggressive response to a report by the left-leaning Mother Jones that O’Reilly, like NBC News anchor Brian Williams, has embellished his record in journalism.
The media tour was a rare one for a cable news anchor of such a large magnitude, particularly one from Fox News, which is typically selective about the outside publications its on-air talent speaks with. The response stands in contrast to NBC’s own response to the flap over Williams retracted claim to have been riding in a helicopter forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003.
Mother Jones writer David Corn reported Thursday, “O’Reilly has repeatedly told his audience that he was a war correspondent during the Falklands war and that he experienced combat during that 1982 conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina.”
Corn added, “American reporters were not on the ground in this distant war zone.”
After the report was published, O’Reilly spoke with several publications to rebut the story, including the Washington Post, the media news site Mediaite, Politico, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, the conservative news site The Blaze, news blog TV Newser and the New York Daily News tabloid.
In each interview, O’Reilly lashed out at Corn, calling him “a disgusting piece of garbage,” a “smear merchant,” and a “pig.” O’Reilly also maintained that he never misrepresented his record as a reporter, saying he never said he was in the Falkland Islands but that he did cover its developments in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he said there were violent protests. (The Falkland Islands are hundreds of miles off of Argentina.)
For his part, Corn has maintained that his story is accurate and that O’Reilly is trying to “hide behind name calling.”
That a major Fox personality was made so available (he even spoke with bloggers frequently critical of his show) and so quickly might indicate that O’Reilly and his superiors were attempting to avoid a drawn-out fiasco like the one besetting Williams. It took a week of trickling reports and media speculation before Williams was finally suspended by NBC, and that was only after he apologized and tried to impose a self-suspension.
“O’Reilly’s strategy was to get in front of the story, smear David Corn, and immediately introduce ambiguity (saying he used ‘the Falklands’ as shorthand for the war, not to suggest he was there when he was clearly covering it from Argentina),” Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible, told the Washington Examiner media desk. “From a crisis management perspective, his rapid response communicates a sense of openness that [embattled NBC News anchor] Brian Williams’s carefully parsed statements never did.”
Williams is currently on a six-month suspension from NBC after he was found to have repeatedly embellished his experiences while covering the early stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Brian Glicklich, a veteran crisis management professional who has represented clients like conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh, suggested it’s possible O’Reilly has taken the reins on the situation.
“With O’Reilly going out so quickly and to so many places, and given what we know about how Fox usually handles publicity, my guess is that he’s calling his own shots and is doing this without Fox publicity’s explicit involvement,” he said. “However, given the amount of media he’s doing and how vociferously he’s denying the claims, he has clearly been informed by the Williams problem and is taking a completely different tack.”
A third public relations specialist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is personally familiar with O’Reilly and Corn, was more cautious.
“O’Reilly is showing he has nothing to hide,” he said. “Although couldn’t the argument be made that Williams got out [in front of his own controversy] immediately but that it just didn’t work?”
