The Hoped-for Twilight of Bill-O

Some of Bill O’Reilly’s former colleagues at CBS News are ganging up on him to dispute his accounts of his Falkland War experiences and his short association with CBS News generally. O’Reilly sees himself as a brilliant and even heroic reporter who was held back by some pernicious good-old-boys system; his colleagues remember a callow hot dog who couldn’t follow direction.

See, for example, “How Bill O’Reilly imploded at CBS following his Falklands War ‘combat’ reporting.” By O’Reilly’s account, his career at CBS was blocked because he wouldn’t play their “games.” But his manager at CBS remembers him as the rookie who showed up at pro training camp for the first time with his scrapbook of press clippings. He was incensed because he wasn’t allowed to present his footage of an alleged riot himself on the nightly news, but instead the footage was spliced in with other footage and presented by Bob Schieffer. Worse, he disregarded instructions to keep camera lights off so as not to draw attention to the filming, putting his camera crew in danger.

In other words, he was oblivious to the deeper meaning of “new hire.” And because he obviously was too much of a prima donna — and more trouble than he was worth — he was quickly let go by CBS, and he is still pissed off about it.

This was all touched off last week when David Corn and Daniel Schulman wrote for Mother Jones that O’Reilly’s accounts of his “combat reporting” in the Falklands War simply didn’t past the smell test. Over the weekend one of Bill-O’s former colleagues at CBS came forward to corroborate what Corn and Schulman wrote. Crooks and Liars has a great video.

Unfortunately, it’s doubtful this revelation will end O’Reilly’s career. The first time I saw O’Reilly on television he struck me as being such an obviously narcissistic and witless gasbag I marveled he made it to national media at all. But Bill-O’s followers love him. They even read his books, such as his book on the Lincoln Assassination that is so riddled with errors that the National Park Service won’t carry it in souvenir shops. O’Reilly has defended himself by saying its hard to know what really happened after all this time, but in fact there is little about the Lincoln assassination that wasn’t documented and preserved down to fine detail. Victorian-era people were hoarders and record-keepers to a fault, and by now more than a century of excellent scholarship has sorted through it all. The truth is that Bill O is a sloppy researcher who didn’t bother to distinguish between good and bad source material. But you can’t tell that to his fans.