Bill O’Reilly is a “blatant bald-ass liar” and the mainstream media has let him off the hook, HBO late-night star Bill Maher charged on his show last night. After several statements O’Reilly has made that have been contradicted by phone records, video, etc. — as well as a couple things he has said or written that the network or the primetime host himself have clarified — Maher said, like he meant it to sting, “Why isn’t the mainstream media going after him with the same ferocity – the supposed liberal media — as they did Brian Williams?”
Panelist David Axelrod, a political adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama, offered an answer: “I suspect it’s because they know it’s not a real news organization and Bill O’Reilly isn’t a real journalist.”
Axelrod – who went on O’Reilly’s show just last week, among other stops, to plug his new book, Believer: My Forty Years In Politics – was preaching to the choir. Even FNC always has maintained Bill is no journalist — it’s why he’s never been allowed to anchor the network’s election-night coverage, for instance (though the ratings probably would go up if they did).
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“Bill O’Reilly being full of shit about something isn’t a news story – it just isn’t,” chimed in Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi, who also was on the Real Time With Bill Maher panel Friday night. He and Axelrod were echoing points made by Comedy Central’s late-night star Jon Stewart last month when the story broke – but by way of defending his pal O’Reilly. “I don’t know if you watch his program. Misrepresenting ‘The Zone’ he is in is kind of his hook,” Stewart insisted. “ ‘You’re in the No Spin Zone’ are the words he utters before throwing to some jackass that disproves global warming by walking around Boston pointing at snow. On a network whose slogan is a textbook case of trolling. No one’s watching him for the actual truth.”
Maher was having none of it, and he thinks the press should be doing a better job of holding O’Reilly accountable for things he’s said of his time as a journalist, while working for other outfits than FNC.
“He said ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head’ in El Salvador –by which, it has since been explained, he saw photos of the incident after the press noted between when he has said he arrived in that area and when the murders occurred,” Maher told viewers last night.
“No, you saw pictures of that!” Maher snapped at O’Reilly – who wasn’t there.
He reads more from O’Reilly: “I’ve seen Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast.”
“No again! — You saw pictures of it. It’s not the same thing,” Maher continued to drill down.
“I’ve seen pictures of the Hindenburg — I don’t say I saw the Hindenburg go down,” Maher blasted, in re these, and more, claims O’Reilly has made about his time as a reporter that are now being disputed. While saying, “I understand why Fox News backs him, because they’re not really a news service,” Maher speculated that if a “liberal” news organization had a show host who’d said he was in a war zone when he was not – a reference to O’Reilly’s claim about his time covering the Falklands War from Buenos Aires for CBS News in 1982 – Fox News would be charging, ” ‘This is an insult to troops who are really in a war zone.'”
“Any journalist knows the difference between being in a war zone and not being in a war zone,” Taibbi giggled.
One source snipped of last night’s program, “Bill Maher will do anything to get a headline now that he’s getting beat by John Oliver in ratings — and buzz.”
O’Reilly’s primetime ratings have gone up as questions about his reporting claims have surfaced. His network, meanwhile, has claimed its biggest star is the victim of “an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates” and that, “(r)esponding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. … Fox News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.”
That said, the network and O’Reilly have walked back from some of his claims about having “seen” historic events, saying he saw photographs of those events. For instance, O’Reilly recently said that when he stated, “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head,” he was referring to having seen photographs of the nuns who were executed in El Salvador in 1980 and not claiming he actually saw the murdered nuns. “While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered,” O’Reilly said the afternoon a report came out questioning his account of his reporting in El Salvador.
“The mention of the nuns on my program came the day of the Newtown massacre (December 14, 2012),” O’Reilly continued. “The segment was about evil and how hard it is for folks to comprehend it. I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil. That’s what I am referring to when I say, ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ No one could possibly take that segment as reporting on El Salvador.”
The problem is that liberals apologize and capitulate when caught in a lie while right-wingers just screams even louder and continues lying. Consistency has its merits, I suppose.
The problem really is that liberal look into a mirror and call conservatives what they see.
What about the Conservatives seeing liberals as a problem. Seeing themselves in the mirror sometimes will help partisanship which is absent, not to mention completely a facade’. Let’s ta take a look at the upcoming Primaries. I cannot wait to listen to the issues. For example, How about Torture in Iran of a Queen who did not know.
the latter would be a great story for the media I would think.
Sepideh Pahlavie
Spoken like an idiot.and you are one.
You doing some of that “mirror looking” the others were talking about?
One big difference between the williams/ oreilly situation is that the williams scandal came out organically. The oreilly article was clearly a planned hit piece that did not go viral on its own.
Doesn’t matter that it was a hit piece because is a lie still and if you’re cool being spoon fed b.s. and propaganda by a bunch of hacks then you’re a fool and a sucker.
Then why do you watch NBC? CBS? ABC? CNN? MSNBC?
You really believe that the Williams story happened “organically” at “Stars and Stripes” connoting patriotic duty in truth telling which, in turn, would exalt the likes of “Fair and Balanced” FOX News? I applaud Maher’s outrage, I was a little disturbed at the panel’s resigned attitude, but in terms of mainstream media there’s a larger story here that’s probably going to be about many shoes dropping not just this one. And O’Reilly – he’s a showbiz guy when all is said and done – but it’s Roger Ailes that needs to be held accountable and it’s up to Murdoch to do something about it. FOX News’s genius (and betrayal of the public) is that it calls itself news at all. It’s a non-stop perpetual Republican political campaign – irrespective of whether there are campaigns to be covered or not – as no-holds-barred as content as any shrill and desperate two months before a presidential election but constantly – night and day every day and night and always and whenever. What news coverage there is is window dressing disguising that fact and and huddled under the umbrella rubric “fair and balanced”. Legal vetting and fact checking at major book publishers deserve a thrashing too. The extent to which you can or can not be sued should not be the only consideration. Combined with past events of the past couple of years, unfortunately for him, all of this undercuts Rupert Murdoch’s news reporting credibility on anything. That’s a shame. I used to admire the guy before he started creating Frankenstein monsters. Either too hands on. Or too purposefully hands off it would seem. Or “palace politics” about everybody trying to please Rupert or stay out of his way.
Bravo! Well said. At this point, Ailes et al know that O’Reilly lied on at least a few occasions, yet do nothing. Maher is right that on at least some of these charges there is no gray area. Shame on them for doing nothing about it. And what a shame for everyone that they’re going to get away with it – even worse, they are going to benefit from it.
The picture I get of the young O’Reilly is that of a massively egotistical, mercenary, but not particularly politically minded man. (Google the story of him in Seattle photocopying his first paycheck to show his mother how much money he is making.) Bill O’Reilly is quite simply a phony. A venom spewing talking head. Roger Ailes’ puppet creation. Probably on orders from Rupert Murdoch.
Nobody really takes FOX seriously, they just look the other way and yawn, even the FOX network isn’t a real network, think about it they program a few hours a night on a bunch of cobbled together stations and they call them selves a network. 8-10pm No evening newscast, no daytime programming,
no programming after 10pm weeknights. FOX broadcasting like FOX news likes to think of themselves as a real network, and a real news organization.
What a joke and everyone knows it. That’s why everyone just yawned at this whole story. I guess O’Reilly needed a ratings boost.
I still can’t get over that jack ass they (FOX) had on election night that kept saying Obama hasn’t won and Romney still has a chance, when most of the votes were in. Who was that jack ass?
“Nobody really takes FOX seriously”
Except liberals, who are deadly afraid of it and will expend energy and resources to discredit and destroy it, and then insist 50,000 times that Fox means nothing and nobody takes it seriously, while posting 100,000 anti-Fox articles and screeds on the internet.
You mean claiming that other people do what you do courtesy of Nixon appointee Scalia and “Citizens United” is supposed to be factual? Pot slandering the kettle black…is a Kung Fu move as some kind of leveling tactic regarding the criticism? Really sharp that MMMKAY description of me. Take-downs by morons always upset me. Gosh those numbers – doubling 50,000 to 100,000 – your accusations round out so nicely as memorable – a very David Miscavige/Scientology tactic actually. Lots of asinine unverifiable numbers that intone enormous and persuasive without any proof of anything whatsoever.
You’re angry and incoherent. And posting under several different names.
“Nobody really takes Fox seriously.”
Well, this is plain wrong. Of course Fox News viewers (and there are millions of them) take the network seriously! Why then would they watch religiously? Fox News KILLS MSNBC and CNN at the ratings all night, every night. KILLS them, like not even close…and Fox has the other cable networks scrambling to try to get more viewers, shuffling around hosts and formatting. It’s a dangerous thing when O’Reilly can claim he’s a journalist, get away with lying, and get his millions of viewers to believe he’s “fair and balanced” and being targeted by resentful liberals. But Fox isn’t the only problem; every network worships the news as entertainment model. The thing is a huge chunk of the country will only watch Fox because it’s been ingrained that their other options gear liberal and hate conservatives and won President Obama the election.
“It’s a dangerous thing when O’Reilly can claim he’s a journalist, ”
Dangerous to liberals. Dangerous to Democrats. Dangerous to the left’s hegemony over journalism, academia and pop culture. Now, we’re getting to the crux of the matter, and why liberals absolutely cannot tolerate Fox.
“…it’s been ingrained that their other options gear liberal and hate conservatives and won President Obama the election.”
That is kind of what happened. dude.
It does great in ratings because conservatives are all watching the same damn thing– it tells them what they want to hear. That says more about the audience than the superiority of the network.
Conservatives all watch FOX because all the other news outlets, cable and even network news, lean left. This is what is taught in journalism school these days…its virtually all opinioned based and biased (liberal) to some degree these days. They created this “monster” themselves.
“Nobody really takes FOX seriously”
you just took yourself out of being taken seriously hehehe
Fox is taken seriously by millions of viewers which is the reason they dominate cable ratings. If Fox was available to the same viewers as NBC, ABC, and CBS, they would destroy them in ratings.
It was not until Fox started broadcasting, in 1996, that the public realized how much the major networks censured what was shown to them. That is one of the factors that has seen so many viewers abandon the networks, in the past twenty years.
Liberals do not like broadcasters like O’Reilly because they question political viewpoints and votes of elected officials because it is difficult or impossible to explain how their actions help the majority of people, in the United States.
One burning question is what do liberals watch because they are not watching MSNBC, CNN, or the major networks since their numbers are so low or perhaps those numbers do illustrate how few true liberals reside, in the United States.
Bush’s brain and Fox darling Karl Rove
That jackass was none other than Bush’s Brain, Mr. Karl Rove, “Turdblossom”. Kinda says it all.
The O’Reilly article was proper investigative journalism but that’s clearly alien to you.
If O’Reilly weren’t such a lowly pathetic lying carnival barker, there’d be nothing to expose so he needs to quit his victimhood crying.
I laugh at you
Have to laugh at Bill Maher. He’s had O’Reilly on his show without a problem one bit. Maher lies about people all of the time, so I guess rules don’t apply to him either.
I’m not a huge fan of Bill Maher, but he never claimed to be a journalist. Bill O’Reilly did. There are, in fact, certain rules which apply to reporters. This includes telling the truth about what they report and where they reported from.
wait, hold on. agree with him or not, Bill Maher doesn’t lie. name one single lie he’s told. note: opinions are not lies, they are opinions. name one single lie.
Maher has said plenty of BS…the problem is the likes of Mother Jones won’t do a hit piece on him.
FOX News = Tone + Attitude X Aggressive Media Bullying of the Cowed Masses Through Select and Parsed Rhetoric Divided by “Fair and Balanced” = The Full and Complete Story and the Only Facts and Opinions You Need to Know or Have.
Which apparently people actually believe in large numbers. Which is how Roger Ailes keeps his job.
They should just call it “The C.I.A. Channel”. It’s a mirror image of the C.I.A.’s propaganda tactics. I mean look at how management is dealing with the O’Reilly issue. All they care about is the ratings as proof of whether or not it matters in terms of the facts or truth. The goal is : if people believe it (or him)…it therefore then is true. And just like the C.I.A. they don’t intend to “confirm” or “deny” a thing about the matter.
Then Obama runs “The NSA Government.”
Something that Maher doesn’t even mention is that O’Reilly repeatedly claimed that the Argentine military shot live ammo into the crowd, killing several protesters (even adding that this was in place of tear gas and rubber bullets) when all evidence that has emerged so far refutes this. O’Reilly made these comments in interviews with Marvin Kalb (go to min 26) and Hamptons TV (go to minute 13) which are easily accessible on YouTube. It’s really disheartening that such fabrications which are so easy to prove are at the same time being so easily (though falsely) denied.
Fox News viewers span the spectrum of political ideology, surveys have consistently shown. Of course they have a conservative bent, just like MSNBC, CNN, NBC, NY Times, LA Times, HuffPo have a liberal bent. Kudos to Fox News for reporting on stories that the left otherwise would never touch. Benghazi, IRS scandal, Grubergate, and many others.
No kudos for you or FOX News, since none of those were actually stories of any real substance.
Benghazi is a tragedy, but there is a matter of those 13(!) Benghazi-like, post-“Mission Accomplished” attacks that happened under Bush that went without any scrutiny of note. You can’t just ignore them and then launch eight massive, expensive investigations into this one, that still haven’t turned anything up, by the way, and expect it to be taken seriously.
The IRS focused heavily-conservative because they were the ones that started using super PACs first and put several orders of magnitude more money into them than any left-leaning factions. Following the money is the most basic, logical investigation tactic there is.
Grubergate is a just the latest in a long line of small, singular statements in a mountain of BS and propaganda surrounding the ACA that desperate, crazy people decided to cling to as evidence they were right all along. That infamous Trainwreck quote, anyone?
Isn’t this “Swift-boating”? Publicly sniping at the memories of someone so as to ascertain their veracity?
David Axelrod claims that FNC isn’t a real news channel as he’s on the Bill Maher show, which is just as opinionated if not more than the Orielly Factor. And if the left actually did falsify their stories they most likely would not be attacked. Who would they possibly be attacked by? Other left wing publications? Bill Maher is a joke. And if anyone comments back referencing Brian Wiliams that is not at all the same thing, unlike bill words could not have been taken out of context when Williams described how his helicopter was shot down.
Maher started his career as a stand-up comedian. Now, he is supposed to be a political commentator. But no, he still takes the liberties that a comedian is allowed such as saying anything true, untrue, snide, vulgar, you name it, in the guise of a political commentator, while running his ‘Not-So-Real Time’ show. He does have credible guests but Maher interjects disgusting “commentary”. He’s a comedian, he can say outrageously untrue things as comedy. Problem is, much of his audience takes his comedic talk as serious political commentary. Maher is passé now that this country is becoming more moderate. I’m not a Maher fan but I have watched him slowly shift his on-camera persona as national political winds shift. Ratings desperation. Maher, be a comedian, fine. But don’t do it under the pretense of political commentary. And shame on HBO for airing his masquerade. I am a conservative who gives due deliberation to liberal views. Maher, however, should be taken for what he is, a comedian.
Bill Maher never described himself as a political comentator. He’s a comedian who courts controversy and makes people laugh at the hypocrisy of politics and the media.
In case you missed it, although he has repeated it many times, he is a comic. Not a political commentor.
Maher really is trying hard to get his fellow liberals to forget he was very critical of Islam 5 seconds ago.
How do Bill Maher, et al, know what Mr. O’Reilly is saying is a lie? This “commentary” Maher proffers, is nothing more than sad, angry rhetoric from a man whose frustrated that the good guys wrested control of the senate away from Harry Reid and his minions, hopefully making this country safe for a republican form of government. And I’ll tell ya this, Hillary will NOT be the president-elect in November 2016. She’s got too much stink around her.
For someone with only about 1 million viewers, Maher gets a lot of press. He’s treated like some important voice, but few listen to it. He’d be perfect on MSNBC.
Bill “I love pictures” O’Reilly is an entertaining FRAUD. His many proven lies would get him fired from any legitimate news program. But Murdoch and Ailes don’t care about legitimacy. So the lying bully wins again. Shocker!
I’m not a fan of Maher but this is so meta, I kind of a have a new found respect for him.
Blowhard Bill burned his bridges with me long ago. I simply do not care about him or Fox News, the faux-news network that hosts him.
The reason they progressive outlets are hesitant to attack O Reilly’s credibility is because everyone of them has the same skeletons in their own closets. Resume “enhancement” is the norm in journalism. They learn how to shine the light on themselves because the tend to be primarily narcissist’s what ever political spectrum they come from! O Reilly has more money than most and will turn the shovel back at those digging up dirt. It will be a circular firing squad and they know it. People like Maher are always dirty so there is nothing to really dig up on him. (Jesus loves you Bill Maher and so do I but you know the truth has to be told) Williams and O Reilly are the tip of the iceberg and in the day of the decline of mainstream journalism, this is a war that could be the death of the craft. The talking heads have lied from day one and have always had an agenda, why is anyone surprised? The progressive side has had the bully pulpit for much longer than the conservative voice (which O Reilly is only a pretender, this was a money maker for him) so in the Hegelian dialectic, where most observe but few see, faux conservative voices needed to be mainstreamed to continue to advance the synthesis. In other words this is all a game to distract you from reality and most of you are a lap dog for one side or the other in this dialectic. While you are busy picking sides, the elite continue to move their control agenda forward while you keep your eyes on the jesters and the clowns.
I saw President Reagan get shot in Washington in 1980 – by which I mean, I got there two hours later for live reports that night, but that’s close enough, right?
Oops, I meant 1981, but 1980 was close enough, wasn’t it??
Bill O’Rielly has the largest audience of any cable news program,
like 3 million people tune in to watch him, hear what he says
Maher, has maybe 10% of that ?
So by going after Bill, he creates a story, and I’M sure he’s hoping to get some people to tune in and see what other stupid things he has to say
Please! Bill O’Reilly isn’t a news anchor. Instead he is a commentator on a talk show. Brian Williams created his downfall and should be punished accordingly. In any other newsroom in America he would have been fired and story ended. But because he is a pseudo celebrity all are pretending to not see his transgression. Give me a break. Stop this nonsense America!
Bill O’Reilly isn’t a news anchor. Williams caused his own demise.
Maher is THE REASON why I cancelled my HBO subscription. He is a spoiled bratt rich kid from Bergen County, NJ, one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, and somehow his BIG MOUTH is attractive to some viewers. I am no O’Reilly fan, but Maher should go on “The Factor” and debate O. But he won’t because he is a punk weasel rich kid with no guts and a pea brain.
He’s being protected hand over foot by Fox News! Like all clothes when you wash them, the dirt always comes out!
Liberal media should not underestimate the rational minds that can see straight through the overblown rants day after day. This much hate usually comes from a place of Jealousy. So pathetic – MOVE ON
Bill’O is a star a very entertaining one but he is a disgrace to every honest journalist. Everyone knows that except for his fanatic fans left wing haters