Publisher to print Bill O’Reilly book with Ireland bombing claim without explanation, clarification: report
The publisher of Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly’s “Keep It Pithy” reportedly plans to continue printing the book without a correction — despite an apparent discrepancy between what O’Reilly witnessed in Northern Ireland and what he claimed to have witnessed.
In the 2013 book, the conservative pundit wrote, “I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”
When Yahoo News asked Fox News what O’Reilly meant by this, they pointed to a recent article in the Washington Post.
A Fox spokesperson told the broadsheet that O’Reilly was referencing photographs of the destruction in Northern Ireland — not the violence itself.
More than 3,500 people were killed and more than 47,500 were injured in the Troubles of Northern Ireland before a peace agreement was reached in 1998.
O’Reilly offered a similar explanation after critics accused him of lying about seeing “guys gun down nuns in El Salvador.” He said that he was shown horrifying images of their murders — again, not the actual murders.
Crown Publishing Group does not intend to add clarifications or corrections to the pages of O’Reilly’s best-seller, Media Matters reported Tuesday.
“Crown will continue to publish our author’s book just as he wrote it,” David Drake, senior vice president of Crown, said to the progressive media watchdog via email.
The book publisher did not respond to a request from Yahoo News for further comment.
Many journalists and bloggers have been scrutinizing O’Reilly’s “war zone” experiences since February 19, when left-leaning website Mother Jones accused him of lying about being on the Falkland Islands during the 1982 Falklands War when he was actually reporting from Buenos Aires.
“I never said I was on the Falkland Islands,” O’Reilly said on his TV program the following day.
PolitiFact.com, a website that analyzes whether political figures are lying, determined that O’Reilly’s statement was a half truth because it is correct but omits context.
“The central word here is ‘on.’ O’Reilly has a point that — at least so far as we can tell — he’s always said he was ‘in’ the Falklands conflict rather than ‘on’ the islands,” Jon Greenberg of PolitiFact.com wrote Tuesday.
As the allegations against O’Reilly continued to mount, Fox News released the following statement earlier in the week:
“Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims leveled against him. This is nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far-left advocates Mother Jones and Media Matters. Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility.”
