A spokesperson for the Fox News Channel said in an article published Sunday that the channel’s head Roger Ailes is giving “full support” to Bill O’Reilly after several former colleagues have come forward questioning the host’s war stories.
“Fox News Chairman and C.E.O. Roger Ailes and all senior management are in full support of Bill O’Reilly,” a spokeswoman told the New York Times in a statement.
For his part, O’Reilly has been aggressively defending his previous statements about covering the Falklands War for CBS in the 1980s after an article by Mother Jones last week questioned his accounts.
At least seven former colleagues of O’Reilly’s at CBS have given interviews stating they do not recognize the Fox host’s descriptions of his time covering the war.
The former CBS journalists echoed Mother Jones’ skepticism of O’Reilly’s occasional claim to have “been there” in the Falklands (he was in Buenos Aires), his description of a violent “riot” in the capital city, and his claim to have rescued a cameraman from danger.
Is there anyone who’s honestly surprised by this? The only thing that would hurt O’Reilly is if his audience left [they won’t] or his advertisers left [they won’t, either]. Ailes isn’t suddenly going to find journalist Jesus and actually give a damn about the integrity of the people he puts on air.
Oh yeah, totally didn’t see that coming.
Ailes has built FOX News on lies, slander and innuendo…the reality is that, compared to what passes as “news” on FOX News, what O’Reilly did was piddling and not even worth mentioning.
In this case its all about the Benjamins, as long as Reilly brings the viewers in, Ailes will support him. Of course, given Ailes high moral standing, if a syphilitic wad of diseased protoplasm brought in money, Ailes would support it too.
Faux Noise is as credible and upstanding as Bill O’Reilly, a desecrated veteran of Boston’s Combat Zone.