In an odd move on Thursday, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly answered charges of embellishing his war zone experience by citing one of his books — a work of fiction.
In an interview with AdWeek’s TVNewser, O’Reilly dismissed an article by Mother Jones magazine that accused him of lying about being in the Falkand Islands in the 1980s while covering a war for CBS.
O’Reilly insisted he had always said he was in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, with the rest of the American press.
When asked about whether he had ever written or said he was in the Falklands, O’Reilly said he “laid this out” in his first book, “Those Who Trespass.”
The 1998 book, a crime thriller about a journalist who ends up murdering his former colleagues, was a work of fiction.
It’s full title is “Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder.”
“I laid this out in a book called, Those Who Trespass,” he told TV Newser. “That was the first book that I wrote. Soup to nuts, what happened in Buenos Aires during the Falklands war.”
Here is a summary from the book from Amazon.com:
O’Reilly’s first novel tells a story of revenge and murder set against the backdrop of television news. The opening chapters detail the corrupt, often despicable world of the networks, where pretty faces from New York conspire to appropriate the work of those on the front lines. When two of the smarmiest conspirators wind up dead, the list of suspects is as long as the number of people the networks have screwed along the way–hundreds. On the case is Detective Tommy O’Malley, along with aggressive journalist Ashley Van Buren. Against his better judgment, Tommy falls for Ashley and becomes the spunky young writer’s informant. But Ashley’s feelings are mixed, for she is also smitten with charming Shannon Michaels, who happens to be at the top of Tommy’s list of suspects. Although stereotypical secondary characters are a drawback, the novel is nicely paced, and the network milieu works well as a setting for murder.
Poe’s Law
This makes like, I think, the third time O’Reilly’s been in a situation where he seems to be building up to a public meltdown that ends his career in a spectacular radioactive fireball. As with the first two, I expect he’ll somehow survive this one.
In other words, he wrote the entire fictional novel as a cathartic exercise because he was having a tantrum over CBS’ use of his lame footage from Argentina…footage he has in the past mischaracterized as showing all sorts of violence during a riot, etc…for a show that he wasn’t invited to be the center of, because standard operating procedure was to take everyone’s footage and mish-mash it. He was bitter and felt like the footage and his reporting from Argentina should’ve been his break through moment and resulted in his christening as the next Kronkite, but that didn’t happen, so he wrote a short novel about his fantasies of killing everyone involved.
This is no different than all the other times he’s cited to fiction on his program and claimed it backs up his opinions factually.
Someone should ask BillO if the character ‘Ron Costello’ in his book was based on CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer.