A report published Thursday became the latest to cast doubts on Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s stories about reporting he did earlier in his career. This time, the Guardian newspaper spoke with former colleagues who worked with O’Reilly when covered the Los Angeles riots for the show “Inside Edition” in the 1990s.
Six former co-workers disputed O’Reilly’s tale of being bombarded with concrete and bricks by rioters while covering the 1992 unrest in Los Angeles, according to the Guardian.
“They were throwing bricks and stones at us,” O’Reilly told an online interviewer in 2006, according to the Guardian.
“Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time,” O’Reilly added.
O’Reilly repeated the story to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt this month.
“We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us,” he told Hewitt, the Guardian reported.
“It didn’t happen,” one colleague from “Inside Edition” told the paper. “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”
Colleagues who spoke to the Guardian said that O’Reilly was embellishing one instance where a local person busted a crewmember’s camera.
The Guardian reported one particularly vivid moment of the story, confirmed by two of the ex-colleagues, in which O’Reilly antagonized local residents after pulling into a battered neighborhood in a limo.
From the Guardian:
Two of the team said the man was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighbourhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”
A spokeswoman for Fox News told the Guardian that the charges were “nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates.”
