O’Reilly continues defense of Falklands War reporting: ‘I want to stop this now’

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly continued his vocal defense of his reporting during the Falklands War on Monday as former CBS News colleagues continued to challenge some of his stories.

On “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday, the embattled host showed archival footage of the 1982 reports that he requested from CBS, in part, to prove that protests he was covering near the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were violent — a characterization some of his former colleagues dispute.

“I reported accurately the violence was horrific,” O’Reilly said.

His guest on the show, Don Browne, a former NBC bureau chief who covered the Falklands War, described the situation on the ground as “intense,” though stopped short of characterizing it as a “riot” or “war zone,” as O’Reilly has characterized it.

“At first, Buenos Aires was a pretty nice place to be if you were covering the war, but as it turned out, it got progressively more intense,” Browne said. “You call it a riot — it was a very intense situation where people got hurt, and it was a very serious confrontation, and it was a defining moment, when the populace really turned on the military.”

Browne added: “Any situation like that, where you bring that kind of intensity together in a protest where the police, and in this case the military, are reacting aggressively, it’s a dangerous cocktail.”

“So there you go,” O’Reilly said. “I want to stop this now. I hope we can stop it. I really do.”

But Eric Engberg, a former CBS News correspondent who reported on the same protests, told the New York Times, “It was the chummiest riot anyone had ever covered.”

Mother Jones — which last week sparked the controversy with a report (“Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem”) that compared O’Reilly’s war stories with Williams’ embellishments — said the video footage did not prove anything.

“Rather than bolstering O’Reilly’s description of the anti-government protest he says he covered as a ‘combat situation,’ the tape corroborates the accounts of other journalists who were there and who have described it as simply a chaotic, violent protest,” the website said.

The issue, according to Mother Jones, is whether Argentine soldiers actually fired into a crowd of civilian protesters, as O’Reilly claimed in a 2009 interview.

“Here in the United States, we would use tear gas and rubber bullets,” O’Reilly said during that interview. “They were doing real bullets. They were just gunning these people down, shooting them down in the street.”

On Sunday, CNN reported that seven of O’Reilly’s former CBS colleagues disputed that account as well as a 2013 assertion that his cameraman was injured in the chaos.

“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,” O’Reilly said on “The Factor” in 2013. “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.”

“Nobody remembers this happening,” Manny Alvarez, a cameraman for CBS News at the time in Buenos Aires, told CNN.

Charles Gomez, another former CBS News correspondent on the ground, told the New York Times that he remembers “tension between the authorities and the crowd” but “did not see any bloodshed.”

“What was happening on the Falkland Islands was a war zone,” Gomez said. “What was happening in Buenos Aires was unrest.”

Last week, Fox News released a statement that Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes and “all senior management are in full support of Bill O’Reilly.”

O’Reilly is not backing down. He told a New York Times reporter: “I am coming after you with everything I have. You can take it as a threat.”