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You are here: Home / Big Media / Combat war reporter Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, & Lies: How they abuse women & journalism

Combat war reporter Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, & Lies: How they abuse women & journalism

April 20, 2017 by wpfixit

More from the Bill O’Reilly diaries of doing things he never did, seeing things he never did, in places he never was, and claiming he is something he isn’t, when he is not claiming he never did the things he did do, continued…

By Nate Thayer

April 21, 2017

 

This Bill O’Reilly soap opera, like O’Reilly himself has long been mind-numbingly annoying. Unlike Bill O’Reilly, you can’t make this stuff up.

 

Bill O’Reilly doesn’t only have a serious problem with women, for which he was ostensibly fired from Fox News a few days ago. He has a very big problem with making stuff up. Since O’Reilly calls himself a journalist, he therefore has long had a problem with me, because, by extension, he has soiled my reputation.


How many times do you have to be slam dunk proven to have–and I am being gentle here–made stuff up before you , Bill O’Reilly,and you, Fox News, get it that no one should believe anything either of you have said, ever.
To do otherwise is the equivalent of debating whether the world is flat or round or whether men landing on the moon was a fake conspiracy: Of course there are some people who might, for whatever odd reasons, argue these things but, frankly, life is too short to be bothered.

 

 

Not only should no one believe anything Bill O’Reilly says, but they shouldn’t believe what anyone else employed by Fox News said as credible while Fox gave O’Reilly a platform to make stuff up for many, many years, not to deliver actual facts to free people, but rather to deliver viewers to advertisers.

 

 

C’mon. How come none of the credible, actual real journalists at Fox didn’t come out long ago and say: “Hey, Bill! Hey, Murdoch! Hey, Roger Ailes! You are free to do anything you want, but you are soiling my reputation. Time for you to go or I am going.”

 

Fox and O’Reilly have been saying for years: “Not only do we make stuff up, but we are going to lie to you again and deny it, and take you for being idiots by saying we never make stuff up because we think you either don’t care we make stuff up or we think you are not smart enough to know when we make stuff up.”

 

Why should anyone have believed anything Bill O’Reilly said since eons ago.

 

The facts showing O’Reilly is a serial liar are overwhelming.

 

This was again corroborated by O’Reilly’s comments last week denying overwhelming evidence he used his perch at Fox News to abuse women in the workplace.

 

But 2015 New York court records show that O’Reilly didn’t limit his abuse of women to when he was at work.

 

The unreconstructed bully, O’Reilly, not only is abusive and degrading to both women and the institution of journalism, but his infidelity to the truth and his promiscuous relationship with dishonesty and bullying those who confront him with facts extends to the perverted equivalent of both incest and pedophilia: When O’Reilly learned his teenage daughter told court investigators she witnessed O’Reilly “choking her mom” and “dragging her by the neck down the stairs,” O’Reilly did what he always has done. He publicly called his own teenage daughter a liar.

 

“All allegations against me in these circumstances are 100% false.”

 

Then when that same teenage daughter, who lived with O’Reilly’s soon-to-be latest ex-wife, declined to visit him, O’Reilly, in a herculean display of bullying and intimidation of his child, sued his daughter’s mother for millions of dollars for not enforcing the court visitation order and won.

 

When the court granted the divorce and awarded his ex-wife millions of dollars, O’Reilly sued his former wife, accusing her of carrying on an affair, arguing he was defrauded and his money went to “finance an existing extra-marital relationship.”

 

O’Reilly then filed a $10 million lawsuit against his wife’s divorce attorney, arguing he “aided and abetted Ms. McPhilmy’s scheme to defraud [O’Reilly] into agreeing to the Separation Agreement for the sole purpose of ousting [him] from the paternal role he had negotiated for and been promised and to obtain substantial money to support Ms. McPhilmy.”

 

O’Reilly then asked the court to keep these facts sealed by the court because “Past media attention has caused his children extreme emotional distress.”

 

Back at work at Fox News, O’Reilly threatened one woman that if she complained about his abusive behavior he would make her “pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born.”

 

O’Reilly responded to his termination this week from Fox by saying, as he always has, that everyone is wrong and he has never been wrong.  He called his Fox News show “one of the most successful news programs in history,” and it is “tremendously disheartening” to have been fired because of “completely unfounded claims.”

 

“But that is the unfortunate reality many of us in the public eye must live with today,” he added.

 

No, Bill O’Reilly and Fox News. What is “tremendously disheartening” and the “unfortunate reality” is that the rest of us have put up with this sort of transparently gobsmacking poppycock equivalent to arguing the earth is flat for what feels about as long as since the ancient Greek mathematicians Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Eratosthenes proved the “completely unfounded claim” that it isn’t.

 

 

Fox News did not fire O’Reilly for making stuff up and calling himself a journalist or being guilty of double-digit documented instances of abusing women or he would have been fired long ago. He was fired by Fox News because 80 companies that spent $35 million advertising on his show last year launched an ad boycott in recent weeks.

 

Here are some things filed under–like you Bill O’Reilly and you Fox News–the collateral damage one accepts as the price one pays for an unfettered free speech.

 
A random and incomplete list includes:
“I’ve covered four wars. I’ve seen the best and the worst,” O’Reilly said. “I’ve been there. That’s really what separates me from most of these other bloviators. I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I’ve seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven’t,” said O’Reilly.
See, that is one time you should have been fired, Bill.

 
Real journalists don’t bloviate, at all, as a profession. Especially about the bad stuff some have experienced or seen. That is because it is dishonorable to the real people who had the bad stuff we have seen, actually happen to them–you know, Bill, those people who aren’t on TV, many of them who are actually dead or scarred by the bad stuff which you never not only experienced but never actually saw, either.

 
Real journalists lie when we are drunk in a bar, but usually only after we actually see or experience bad stuff when we are with other people who actually have also seen bad stuff happening so that we don’t have to think about it.

 
And we never share lies, ever, with people like you, Bill, except, occasionally, when maybe we are trying to get you to give us a chunk of your 30 pieces of silver by picking up the bar tab.

 
Every news organization O’Reilly has previously been associated with and every person who has actually been somewhere that is in question regarding O’Reilly’s comic book version of his journalism career has gone public and said: “Actually, that is not true. You are lying, Bill.”


Fox News said, effectively, they didn’t care O’Reilly has been a long proven fraud. To the contrary, they supported him being a fraud and lying to you and me and supported him when, after that fact was corroborated with near scientific accuracy, they both effectively suggested that facts were irrelevant, and, by extension, so is, to them, the intelligence of you and me.

 
O’Reilly’s book publisher, Holt and Co., have said exactly the same thing.

 

These lies included:
***Bill O’Reilly said “I covered the Falklands War”, described the capital of Argentina (which is where O’Reilly occupied his bunker at a 5-star hotel 1200 miles from the Falkland War), as a “war zone” and a “combat situation.” It was there where O’Reilly said he had an “M-16 pointed at my head from 10 feet away” and where “bodies were mowed down in front of me” and “many were killed” and “I almost got killed” by “hostiles” in a “combat situation”.

These assertions present a few problems: There were no people “mowed down” in Buenos Aires for him to have seen. His own cameraman confirmed that (corroborated by their being no film of the non-event). Neither the Argentine army nor the British (who were 1200 miles from O’Reilly, use M-16 rifles. There were not “many killed” in the Argentine capital (there were not even many killed 1200 miles away in the Falklands). O’Reilly never was “almost killed” (which is sort of like being almost pregnant), according to every journalist who had witnessed the events at that time. And there was no “combat situation” in Buenos Aires. It was a pretty routine, not very violent street demonstration.

 
“The Argentine troops shoot the people down in the street. They’re shooting them down. It’s not like rubber bullets or gas, people are dying alright,” O’Reilly told Marvin Kalb in 2008 describing his heroic career as a war correspondent. “It’s unbelievable, I mean people are just falling, ‘bing, bing, bing, bing’.”

 

He also said he “saved” the CBS photographer while they were “in the Falklands.”

 
At least 7 other CBS journalists who were in Buenos Aires (1200 miles from the Falklands) with O’Reilly said none of this was true.

 
O’Reilly, being O’Reilly, then double downed and said that those who questioned his promiscuous philandering with making stuff up, unconnected to his abuse of women, were part of  “a liberal conspiracy” and “pinheads” who were “out to get me.” He called those who disputed this “liars” and “irresponsible guttersnipes”.

 

Bill O’Reilly is a full-service, gender neutral bully.

 
***“I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador” O’Reilly said and, in 2005, said “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head,” O’Reilly said.

 
After numerous journalists who actually were there called him out on his fictional combat journalist heroics, O’Reilly said, actually, he never saw any nuns getting shot, but rather saw pictures of the nuns after they were shot–sort of like the rest of the world who watched TV news in December 1980, when O’Reilly was not even in El Salvador.

 
He then lied and covered up and bullied more when he followed this up and said, 35 years later in 2015, that when he said that, again, on TV, in 2012, he was talking about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. “I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil. That’s what I am referring to when I say ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ No one could possibly take that segment as reporting on El Salvador.”

 

Right, Bill. But you weren’t at Sandy Hook either, and neither were any nuns (who you never saw in El Salvador because you weren’t there) you “saw shot in the back of the head” in Connecticut, either.

 

 

So there is that. And a lot more.

 


***“I have covered four wars: The Falklands, Central America, Northern Ireland, and Israel” O’Reilly said in 2015. But when O’Reilly made those comments, it was pretty much science that the first two “wars” O’Reilly said he covered, O’Reilly actually didn’t cover because, well, because one was not a war and the other he was never even there.

 

***Regarding O’Reilly’s claim in his 2013 book “Keep It Pithy” he was a “combat reporter” in Northern Ireland,  he said: “I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”

 

But that didn’t happen either, Bill.

 

Bill O’Reilly, in a statement released by Fox News in March 2015, admitted that he covered the “war” in Northern Ireland sort of like he covered the war in El Salvador–he saw, after whatever he was referring to actually happened where he wasn’t, only actual pictures of bombings that were taken by actual other people because actually O’Reilly was not actually there and did not actually see anything.

 

***Regarding O’Reilly’s War #4: No one was able to pin him down on actually what “war” he covered in Israel or when that “war” was or what “combat” he “covered” at that time, in that place and all that other pesky journalistic who, what, when, where, and why stuff etc.

 

Someone will get to the very shallow bottom of that soonish, maybe. But does it really matter?

 

Fox News didn’t care then any more than they cared that he was a serial abuser of women when they fired him last week.

Fox didn’t terminate O’Reilly because he is a bully and a misogynist. They fired him because they were concerned that O’Reilly’s job to deliver viewers to advertisers threatened their profit margins and his usefulness had reached a point of diminishing returns.

 

Unlike O’Reilly or Fox News has ever done, I remain all ears, and open to evidence to the contrary.

 

O’Reilly doubled down when confronted with his tenuous, soiled, and disrespectful relationship with the truth and adamantly insists that “Everything I have said during my career as a reporter or written is true. Everything.”

 

When he was asked if he had ever made any errors on describing his career as a news journalist, he said: “No. Nothing.”

 

He should have been fired for that alone, because, like the rest of us, he is not God.

 

So now let us address Bill O’Reilly’s true story on his groundbreaking reporting on who was really behind the Kennedy assassination:

 
***O’Reilly claimed, in his 2015 book on the Kennedy assassination –which is unclear (and disputed by his ghost writer) that he actually ever wrote– that he knocked on the door of the man who was about to reveal the true story of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. As he was knocking on the man’s Florida door, O’Reilly claims he heard a shotgun blast go off–and the man escaped justice by shooting himself to avoid O’Reilly revealing the truth to the world of the killing of Kennedy.
From his 2012 book Killing Kennedy, Bill O’Reilly writes on page 300:

 
“In March, 1977 a young television reporter began looking into the Kennedy assassination. As part of his reporting, he sought an interview with the shadowy Russian college professor who had befriended the Oswald’s upon their arrival in Dallas in 1962. The reporter tracked George de Mohrenschildt to Palm Beach, Florida, and travelled there to confront him. At the time, de Mohrenschildt had been called to testify before a Congressional committee looking into the events of November, 1963. As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood. By the way, that reporter is Bill O’Reilly.”

 
And in his audio book, spoken in Bill O’Reilly’s own voice, he said the same as above, except inserted between the words “as the” and “reporter knocked on the door” he inserted the word “Dallas”.

 
He also wrote the same in “Kennedy’s Last Days”, the 2013 adaption of “Killing Kennedy” adult version designed for a children’s audience: “As I knocked on the door, I heard a shotgun blast. He had killed himself.”

 
This is O’Reilly both writing under his own name, and speaking in his own voice, and writing for children in his own name, as told by O’Reilly himself, about American History and his career as a news journalist.

 
He repeated it again while promoting his book on Fox News on October 2, 2012. Appearing on Fox & Friends, O’Reilly said he “was about to knock on the door where [de Mohrenschildt] was, his daughter’s house, and he blew his brains out with a shotgun.”


Then O’Reilly replayed that same clip from October 2012 on his own Fox show, the O’Reilly Factor, a special edition before the Fox News’ airing of the film of his book “Killing Kennedy”, which Fox broadcast on November 30, 2014.

 
So that is at least six separate times, over a number of years, he publicly claimed to have knocked on a Florida door and heard a shotgun blast as someone killed themselves.

 
The problem? Bill O’Reilly didn’t hear “a shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian (sic)”, because Bill O’Reilly was not in Florida.

 
That actually is, also, confirmed by a tape recording of Bill O”Reilly himself talking on the phone the same day of said shotgun blast, March 29, 1977. O’Reilly was telephoning, from Dallas, someone who was in Florida.

 
The below is O’Reilly, calling from Dallas, Texas, speaking with Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who WAS in Florida, at about 6:30 PM EST, 3+ hours after the said dead person was dead.


Audio tape dated March 29, 1977:
Bill O’ Reilly: Hi Gaeton. Bill O’Reilly
Gaeton Fonzi: Yeah
O’Reilly: Something definitely did happen
Fonzi: Yeah. I got it
O’Reilly: What is it?
Fonzi: He committed suicide up here in where I was trying to locate them
O’Reilly: OK, where is that?
Fonzi: It is a place called Manalapan. M-A-N-A-L-A-P-A-N. Palm Beach County
O’Reilly: OK, so, he is dead
Fonzi: Yeah
O’Reilly: OK. What time?
Fonzi: Late this afternoon. I don’t know.
O’Reilly: OK, gun?
Fonzi: I think, yeah, I think he said he shot himself
O’Reilly: OK. Ah, Jesus Christ.
Fonzi: Isn’t that something. Jesus
O’Reilly: Now, we got to get this guy Epstein. I’m coming down there tomorrow. I’m coming down to Florida. We got to get this guy. He knows what happened
Fonzi: Well, I am going to be up there probably trying to secure the papers
O’Reilly: Yeah, OK. Well I’m going to get in there tomorrow. I am going to get a car.
O’Reilly: Is there a number–will you leave a number at your house where I can reach you at
Fonzi: The only way–call the magazine
O’Reilly: OK. OK. Now, Ok, I’m gonna try and get a night flight out of here, if I can. But I might have to go tomorrow morning. Let me see.

After Media Matters broke this Bill O’Reilly story in 2015, O’Reilly’s book publishers told CNN: “We fully stand behind Bill O’Reilly. This one passage is immaterial to the story being told by this terrific book and we have no plans to look into this matter.”

 
Henry Holt and Co. publicity director Pat Eisemann told Dallas-based “D” magazine: “We fully stand behind Bill O’Reilly and his bestseller ‘Killing Kennedy’ and we’re very proud to count him as one of our most important authors.”

 
The Epstein fellow mentioned in the above audio tape is the very credible long time investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, then on assignment for Readers Digest, who was in Florida and had spoken to the now dead guy about an hour before he was dead.

 
This is from Epstein’s personal diary he wrote that day, March 29, 1977:
Edward Jay Epstein
http://edwardjayepstein.com/diary/dem.htm
Entry Dated March 29, 1977
Palm Beach, Florida

 
At 5 p.m, a police car, siren wailing, arrived at the Breakers Hotel. It had come for me. A Sheriff’s deputy explained that the States Attorney needed to see me because I was apparently the last person to have seen George De Mohrenschildt alive. De Mohrenschildt, who was a key witness in the Kennedy assassination, had died an hour before from a gunshot wound to his head.

 
The news came as a shock. I had been in the midst of a four day interview with De Mohrenschildt, for which I had agreed to pay him a $4,000 “honorarium.” I had never before paid anyone for an interview, but De Mohrenschildt had had an extraordinary relationship with the subject of my book, Lee Harvey Oswald. I had reason to believe that he might have been in a position to cast light on Oswald’s prior entanglement in the web of intelligence services. He had been, as far as I was concerned, a man of considerable mystery…. I first interviewed him on April 22, 1976, but he was not forthcoming. Then, he mysteriously vanished in Europe. When he returned in 1977, he informed me that he needed money. At that point, I offered him a $1,000 a day for a 4-day interview. The first day had gone well. With the help of my research assistant, Nancy Lanoue, I managed to fill in many of the gaps in his career prior to his meeting Oswald.

 
Then, this morning, I asked him about why he, a socialite in Dallas, sought out Oswald, a defector. His explanation, if believed, put the assassination in a new and unnerving context. He said that although he had never been a paid employee of the CIA, he had “on occasion done favors” for CIA connected officials…..(De Mohrenschildt described) an inscribed photograph showing Oswald dressed in black, holding, in one hand, the radical newspaper The Militant and, in the other, the sniper’s rifle with the telescopic sight– that he had shown De Mohrenschildt the week before. The photograph was signed “For George, Lee Harvey Oswald” and dated April 5th, 1963. Marina had derisively scribbled in Russian “Hunter of Fascists. Ha. Ha.”….I asked whether he had any proof the inscribed photograph existed. He offered to make the photograph available to me through his lawyer, Pat Russell, and I could verify the handwriting of Oswald’s and Marina’s. He then opened up his thick black address book and wrote out Russell’s phone number.

 
It was now 1:30 p.m. and we decided to break for lunch. We agreed to meet again at 3 p.m. Just after De Mohrenschildt left the room I noticed that he had left his address book on the couch and mentioned it to Nancy. A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I realized he had returned for his address book which I handed back to him. It was the last time I saw him.”

In fact, it was the last time anyone saw him outside his household where he went and killed himself. Bill O’Reilly, who was in Dallas during this time, was not only not in Florida, he was unaware of any of these events.

 
Epstein continues: “David Bludworth, The State’s Attorney, was a folksy, charming and savvy interrogator. He began by telling me that De Mohrenschildt had put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself at 3:45 p.m. There were no witnesses— and no one home at the time of the shooting. The precise time of his death was established by a tape-recorder, left running that afternoon to record the soap operas for the absent Mrs. Tilton, and which recorded a single set of footfalls in the room and the blast of the shotgun, which was found on the Persian carpet next to him. No suicide note or other clue was found. He said I was probably the last person to talk to him. Then, he asked whether I had in my possession De Mohrenschildt’s black address book. I replied “No.” He politely rephrased the question, and asked me again–about a half-dozen times, whether I had the black book. (I wondered whether this line of questioning proceeded from De Mohrenschildt having told someone else that he had left his book in my room— or, even somehow my remark that he had left his book had been overheard.)

 
Gradually, the questioning became more relaxed and Nancy and went for a drink with Bludworth. He then told us that De Mohrenschildt’s sudden death had caused “havoc” in Washington. The House Select Committee on Assassinations believed that De Mohrenschildt was a “crucial witness” and, for the past week, had the FBI search for him in three countries. Just that day, after locating him in Palm Beach, the Committee had dispatched one of its investigators to subpoena him. Bludworth knew this, he continued, because that investigator’s card had been found at the Tilton mansion. Bludworth’s theory was that De Mohrenschildt returned from his interview with me, saw the card, realized he was going to have to testify on this subject, and, not being able to face that ordeal, killed himself with the shotgun.”

 
The banner headline of the New York Post that night was “KEY JFK WITNESS KILLS HIMSELF.”

 

Bill O’Reilly, at the time, was in Dallas.

 
From Epstein’s diary, two days later on March 31, 1977:
March 31, 1977
Palm Beach
Two FBI agents arrived at my hotel. They were both polite and precise in their questions. They asked me how I had located De Mohrenschildt in Florida.

 
They explained that Just two weeks before he had turned up in Florida, De Mohrenschildt had literally “vanished” from the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, leaving his luggage, raincoat and pipe behind in his room– just minutes before he had been scheduled to meet with a Soviet diplomat. After he was reported missing in Belgium, he had reportedly flown from London and New York. They wanted to know if De Mohrenschildt had not given me any of his personal papers. When I said “No,” they thanked me for my time and left.”

 
That is an example of not having to make stuff up to create a good, solid news story. Which Epstein did. And O’Reilly didn’t, because he was not there.

 
Bill O’Reilly was never in Florida. And he never heard a shotgun blast go off as he was knocking on the door of De Mohrenschildt in Palm Beach.

 

It would be a great story if it was true. But it is not.

 

But since it was a good story, Bill O’Reilly not only just made it up, he took credit for other people’s work. That is otherwise known as plagiarism.

 

That sort of stuff gets people like me, rightly so, fired immediately.

 

But O’Reilly then wrote it in books and told the untrue story over and over on TV while promoting his book. And, when confronted with the truth, again in 2015, he still had the audacity to say it was all true.

 

And the embarrassing Fox News still went on the record, again, defending any suggestions otherwise as a liberal plot. Plus, Henry Holt, his publisher, publicly stated they won’t even look into whether it is true because O’Reilly is one of their most successful “non-fiction” authors.

 
It is all rather depressing.
See this link for some details: http://mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2015/02/24/38768/oreilly-killingkennedy-mohrenschildt

 

 

In fact, O’Reilly’s bald lies regarding his Kennedy book were first exposed by Jefferson Morley in 2013 post on his website JFKFacts.org. Morley is a former editor for The Washington Post, and a real, actual journalist.

 
Gaeton Fonzi was a congressional investigator on the JFK inquiry by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970’s.
Fonzi wrote about O’Reilly in his 1993 memoir, The Last Investigation:
“About 6:30 that evening I received a call from Bill O’Reilly, a friend who was then a television reporter in Dallas,” wrote Fonzi.

 
Tape recordings of phone conversations between Fonzi and O’Reilly on March 29, 1977 show Fonzi is writing the truth. Marie Fonzi, his widow, provided the tape recordings to the serious news site, Jefferson Morley’s JFKFacts.org:
“Gaet liked O’Reilly and did lots to help him,” Marie Fonzi told JFK Facts in an email. “He hired him in the early ’70s when editor of Miami Magazine at $25 a month to write movie reviews. He wrote letters of reference for him and was instrumental in getting him his first TV shot.”

 
“I know O’Reilly was in Dallas” on March 29, 1977. “There is no question about it,” she told the website. O’Reilly was in his office at the WFAA TV studios in Dallas, Texas, more than 1,200 miles away.

 
O’Reilly was taped calling Fonzi on March 29, 1977: “We just got a call from de Mohrenshildt’s lawyer saying he committed suicide in Miami today,” O’Reilly was quoted saying in Fonzi’s book. “You hear anything about it?”

 
Fonzo says he had not. “So as far you know he’s still alive?” O’Reilly says. “We just got the call twenty minutes ago.”
“That’s 6:30 here,” Fonzi replies.

 
O’Reilly was in Texas, which is the Central Time Zone, one hour behind Florida, which is the Eastern Time Zone. So if O’Reilly “just got the call twenty minutes ago” (according to O’Reilly in Texas), which, when it was “6:30 here” (according to Fonzi in Florida), that means that O’Reilly learned of the death at around 6:10 PM on the evening of March 29, 1977, three hours after it occurred in Florida while O’Reilly was in Texas.

 
Pretty elementary stuff.
See his article here on O’Reilly in 2013: http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/news/reporters-tape-exposes-bill-oreillys-jfk-fib/

 

Then Media Matters fleshed out the lies. Then the Washington Post pretty much slam dunked the entire episode as a figment of O’Reilly’s imagination.

 
Two of O’Reilly’s former colleagues at WFAA told Media Matters that O’Reilly’s version of events regarding the fellow connected to Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, is a lie.

 
“Bill O’Reilly’s a phony, there’s no other way to put it,” said Tracy Rowlett, a former WFAA reporter and anchor who worked with O’Reilly. “He was not up on the porch when he heard the gunshots, he was in Dallas. He wasn’t traveling at that time.”

 

 

Byron Harris, a past 40 year veteran reporter at WFAA, said O’Reilly never went to Florida and he stole the story on the suicide from a Dallas newspaper.
Harris: O’Reilly “was in Dallas. He stole that article out of the newspaper. I guarantee Channel 8 didn’t send him to Florida to do that story because it was a newspaper story, it was broken by the Dallas Morning News.”

 

Harris added O’Reilly was “often not a truthful person” and “was just a jerk, nobody liked him. He was always tooting his own horn.”

 
Rowlett: “I don’t remember O’Reilly claiming that he was there. That came later, that must have been a brain surge when he was writing the book”, adding that WFAA “would have reported it as some kind of exclusive — and there was no exclusive — if O’Reilly had been standing outside the door” when the fellow blew out his brains with a shotgun. “It was my experience with O’Reilly that he was less than an honest reporter, generally. He was the most disliked person in our newsroom. He wasn’t to be trusted, he was all about Bill O’Reilly, he wasn’t about the news.”

 
The investigator for the House Select committee on Assassinations, who was in Florida, and who O’Reilly called from Dallas, died a couple of years ago. But he made tape recordings of his conversations with O’Reilly. And his wife still has them.

 

 

Here are transcripts from them:
Gaeton Fonzi was interviewed on 8th October, 1994:
Q: Do you think that de Mohrenschildt committed suicide because you were going to see him? What was your reaction upon hearing of his suicide?

 
A: Yeah. Again, this is my opinion. At the time de Mohrenschildt committed suicide, there were a number of things taking place, and a number of specific factors that put a lot of pressure on him. The House Committee was getting started again. He was being asked, I believe, to begin another role in his relationship to the assassination and his testimony before the Warren Commission….And then, Epstein shows up. And once again, spends a whole afternoon with him at a hotel in Palm Beach. And, I think, he’s under a lot of pressure. He comes back home and his daughter hands him my card. I had been there in the morning and I told his daughter that I wanted to talk to him and that I would be back in touch. He puts the card in his shirt pocket and goes upstairs and blows his head off. And so, I think you have a whole series of linkages there.”

 
The respected history library, Spartacus Educational, wrote:
“In 1977 George De Mohrenschildt approached Epstein complaining that he was short of money. Epstein offered him $4,000 for an interview…On 29th March, 1977, Epstein and De Mohrenschildt, broke for lunch and decided to meet again at 3 p.m. George De Mohrenschildt returned to his room where he found a card from Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator working for the Select House Committee on Assassinations. George De Mohrenschildt’s body was found later that day. He had apparently committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth.”
See the link here: http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKepstein.htm

 
In addition, there is the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office official death investigation. They interviewed everyone and there is no mention of Bill O’Reilly, or anyone, knocking on the door and a shotgun blast going off.
The transcript is here: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt

 
Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office official death investigation:
March 29, 1977
Excerpts: “Found in the deceased’s pants pocket was newspaper article from the March 20, 1977 edition of the Dallas Morning News, which indicated that the deceased may possibly have been involved in, or have knowledge of, some type of conspiracy in the above-mentioned assassination.”

 

 

The “sequence of events leading up to the victim’s death was determined. It should be noted at the outset that the exact moment of death (1455) and time sequences afterwards have been established by a taped recording of a television show which was taking place in the room adjacent to the hallway in which the victim met his demise….the victim seemed to enjoy his leisure and prepared for his up-coming meeting with a writer, named EDWARD EPSTEIN, in Palm Beach, on 29 March, 1977. On that date, he arose, at approximately 0720 hours, dressed, and went to the kitchen, at 0730 hours; where, the cook, Miss Romanic, fed him a light breakfast of toast and coffee. He then was seen taking a short walk on the beach, then went for a short ride in his rented car, which he had received from Mr. Epstein, after making brief contact with him on the previous day in Palm Beach. He returned to the house, but he stayed only for a short period of time, then departed for his appointment with Mr. Epstein at the Breakers Hotel, in Palm Beach.

 
There he discussed an article which Mr. Epstein was writing and for which the victim was to receive Four Thousand Dollar ($4,000.00) from Reader’s Digest…During this time, between 1000 hours and 1100 hours, an investigator for the House Committee on Assassinations, named GAETON FONZI, appeared at the Tilton residence inquiring about the victim and his whereabouts. Mr. Fonzi left after speaking with Alexandra deMohrenschildt and saying that he would return at a later time to see her father. The interview at the Breakers Hotel was terminated after noon, and the victim promised to return later that day, at 1500 hours, to continue the conversation. He returned to the Tilton residence and ate a light lunch in the kitchen, at approximately 1245 hours. After lunch, the victim’s daughter informed him, in Spanish, apparently so that the house maid and cook who were also present would not understand, that investigator Fonzi found him and wished to speak to him. The news apparently upset the victim, and he went upstairs to his room after bidding good-bye to his daughter and her friend, Katherine Loomis, who went shopping, at roughly 1330 hours. Mrs. Tilton had left the house at noon and drove to a card-playing appointment with several friends in Palm Beach, and she did not see the victim at all on the day of his death. Prior to her leaving, she instructed her maid, ANNA VIISOLA, to place her cassette tape recorder near the television in her bedroom and record two of her favorite day time serials, so that when she returned she could listen to the tape recording and be able to follow the story line. This is the tape recording referred to earlier in this narrative which was helpful in establishing the time of death.

 
Prior to 1400 hours, Mrs. Viisola went to Mrs. Tilton’s bedroom on the second floor and was doing some housework when the victim came out of his room and complained of hearing scratching noises and suspected that a cat, of which there are none in the household, was responsible for the noises. The maid searched the second floor briefly, concluded that the victim was hearing things, and continued with her work. Roughly at 1415 hours, that tape cassette ran out and was switched over to side two by the maid, who then went downstairs, leaving the victim in his room. He apparently left his room, walked the short distance down the hallway to Mrs. Tilton’s room, and removed a double-barrel, .20-gauge shotgun from its resting place beside her bed, along with two live .20-gauge shotgun shells form a night stand which also was beside the bed. He then walked out of the bedroom, turned to his left and entered a small hallway off the main hallway in which there was a chair and a chest of drawers. The victim loaded the weapon, sat in the chair, placed the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger, at 1421 hours, thus, discharging the weapon at an upward angle through the roof of his mouth and into his brain. The shot went unheard by Mrs. Viisola, who was working in the kitchen below, as well as by Miss Romanic, who was sunning herself in the back yard; and by the gardener, Coley Wimbley, who also was at the rear of the house in the garden.

 
The victim’s daughter and her friend returned to the Tilton residence, at 1435 hours, from their brief shopping trip. They entered the house, at 1437 hours, and Miss deMohrenschildt went upstairs to give her father some toilet articles which she had purchased for him. At 1439 hours, she discovered his body and summoned the help of the rest of the household, who notified the Manalapan Police Department.

 
On 30 March, 1977, this writer went to WPTV television station, in West Palm Beach, florida, in an attempt to ascertain the exact time of death, based on the television program which was being recorded at the Tilton home. The television show was “The Doctors”, day time serial which was being broadcasted from New York City by the NBC Television Network, from 1400 hours to 1500 hours, on that day. Side number two of the tape cassette begins in the middle of a Betty Crocker frosting mix commercial and then leads into a General Mills Golden Gram commercial, which according to a computer read-out from NBC in New York began at 2:19 and 11 seconds. Two other commercials follow and they end at 2:20 and 40 seconds. Twenty-three seconds later the shotgun blast, which took the victim’s life, can be heard over the television show, thus, establishing the time of death at 2:21.03 P.M. EST (Eastern Standard Time).

 
From interviews with the principles in this case, and after reviewing the non-television-related sounds on the tape cassette, the following outline of activities and times was assembled; (it will be recalled that the Rawlins Alarm System installed in the Tilton residence produces an audible beep when the doors or windows are opened). The first beep is explained as being Miss Romanic, the cook, walking out the back door to sun herself for a while in the back yard.

 
At 2:21.03 P.M, the gunshot is audible and almost immediately something is heard falling to the floor, believed to be the shotgun falling, or catapulted by the blast, to the floor. No other sounds are heard until 2:23 P.M., when the door beeper again sounds, this time it is Mrs. Viisola taking a bag of garbage out the rear door and disposing of it in a trash can immediately to the right (south) of the door. At 2:26 P.M., the rear door beeps again and is Miss Romanic coming in from the back yard.

 
No sounds, other than the t.v. show, are heard until 2:37 P.M., when the door beeper is heard when Miss Loomis and Coley Wimbley enter the house via the back door after the shopping trip. Another beep is heard a short time after that, at 2:38 P.M., which is the victim’s daughter entering the rear door.

 
At 2:39 P.M., a woman’s voice apparently coming from the end of the upstairs hallway can be clearly heard, “Hey, where is he?” and is known to be Miss deMohrenschildt. Twenty seconds later the shrieks of Miss deMohrenschildt can be heard as she discovers the body of her father and is taken downstairs.

 
At 2:46 P.M., the sound of a siren nearing the Tilton residence can be heard, thus, marking the arrival of the Manalapan police units.

 
This writers investigation has failed to produce any evidence which would tend to indicate that the victim met his death by any means other than by his own hand. All of the facts indicate that he was a disturbed man, who, at the time of his death, was suffering from the same overwhelming mental pressures which must have surely prompted his four prior suicide attempts, in Texas, in 1976. This death investigation is, therefore, declared to be a suicide and is hereby
THIS CASE IS EXCEPTIONALLY CLEARED.
This report transcribed from tape: On 4 April, 1977 by Linda E. Albritton.
Reporting Deputy(writer): Det. Thomas Neighbors/lea
Deputy No. 5104 Case Number: 77-11753 Date: 3-29-77
You can read the entire, lengthy police death investigation here:

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/D%20Disk/deMohrenschildt%20George/Item%2016.pdf

 
As the Dallas Observer said: “But, no. No. It was never he-said she-said. It was always the tapes — the tape recordings of O’Reilly calling from Dallas to Palm Beach to find out if it was true the man had already killed himself. You can’t be in Dallas making a call to Palm Beach asking about it right after it happened if you were standing on the porch in Palm Beach only hours before when it did happen.”

 
Glen Hunter, of “D” Magazine–a Dallas based media outfit, also gets it right: “Either come forward with proof that he really was in Florida that March day in 1977; or ‘fess up to concocting the tale, ask the public for forgiveness, and try to move on. Until he does, he’s fair game to be hounded about it during every interview he gives and every public appearance he makes.”
But O’Reilly and Fox still insists “everything I have ever written is true.”

 
Wrote O’Reilly: “As I knocked on the door, I heard a shotgun blast. He had killed himself.”

 

You can hear and watch Bill O’Reilly lie about all this here:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/oreilly-jfk-figure-suicide-cnn-audio

 
So there you have it.

 
Over to you, Bill O’Reilly and Fox News. Or better yet, not….

 

Filed Under: Big Media, Bill O'Reilly, Journalism, Journalistic Ethics, Media, Media Ethics, Propoganda Tagged With: Bill O'Rielly, Fox News, Kennedy assassination, Media Ethics, Nate Thayer

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