He didn’t exaggerate, he flat out lied. He said he was in combat “in the Falklands.”
Does Anderson Cooper get to say he “went into combat” because he was in Ferguson? Williams said his plane was near enemy fire when it wasn’t. O’Reilly wasn’t even in the theater where the war took place.
I still maintain that Williams’ crime was worse because he’s supposed to be a proper newsman, but O’Reilly’s lie was much worse.
Wasn’t it a helicopter, and didn’t he claim it was hit and had to force landing? That’s a bit different from saying he was “near” enemy fire-- it’s claiming to be in, and hit by, enemy fire.
I liked Brian Williams and am a tad disappointed by his fibbery.
I have no respect for O’Reilly so he could tell flat-out lies and I wouldn’t care.
I thought he was, in fact, “near” enemy fire - the helicopter ahead of his did take a hit, just not the one Williams was actually riding in.
He was 30 minutes behind. So, he may have been “near” enemy fire for some definitions of “near” (if we assume the copters are flying even at 60 mph, that would be 30 miles away), but he claimed to not only have been “in” enemy fire, but to have been “hit” and “forced to land”.
It’s kind of funny that this thread was started to keep the BW thread form being hijacked into a discussion about BO, and here we are talking about BW instead. 
Actually, I think that’s what his first explanation/apology implied with some vague, weaseling words, but it turned out he was somewhere around 30 minutes to an hour *behind *the heli that got hit.
Yeah, I know about the lie. I was asking about what had actually happened. I was under the impression that his copter had been a lot closer to the one that was shot, but thirty minutes away is stretching the definition of “near” pretty badly.
Yeah, but if one is looking back, I can see one thinking… Jeez, I missed out on being shot down by just 30 minutes!! Near in time as opposed to near in space.
Yes, and along side Gwen Ifill on the PBS NewsHour ain’t gonna happen anytime soon either.
He would make a funny Daily Show correspondent if they played up his bloviating know-it-allness
and riffed on his persona.
There are conflicting accounts. The pilot of the Chinook he was in says no, ground crew and pilots of other choppers in their “convoy” or whatever say yes. How any of them (Williams included) can claim to remember exactly what happened is beyond me.
More than half the discussion is comparing the two anyway. The threads might as well be recombined.
So a guy that was in Miami at the time says O’Reilly’s recollections are correct? Or was Browne in Argentina?
Here is what others who were in Argentina have to say.
O’Reilly says, “I want to stop this now.” Yes, Bill, I’m sure you do: Bill O'Reilly tries to end Falklands controversy: 'I want to stop this now'
It’s worth noting that the contemporaneous CBS News account that I linked above suggests that while O’Reilly is exagerating the riots, these others are now downplaying it, and the truth is somewhere in middle.
For example, the claim that no camera crew was injured is apparently contradicted by the report at the time. And while people are now claiming that it’s impossible for anyone to have been killed and them not to have known about it, the CBS report (while not suggesting anyone was killed) said that the number who were seriously injured is unknown due to a media clampdown by the Argentinian government.
Well, certainly either O’Reilly is exaggerating now or was a lousy reporter then, because reports of people being shot dead in the streets of Buenos Aires would have made quite the story.
Clear enough from the CBS footage is that there were a LOT of people yelling, police in riot gear, and something being shot by those police. Fair enough to call it a riot.
A review of contemporary news coverage in Buenos Aires authored in 2004 by a Chilean noted:
Seems the contemporary media certainly understood that thousands were taking to the streets in Buenos Aires, with estimates of 4,000 up to 40,000 protesters depending upon the bent of the reporter. The referenced numbers come from reportes from The London Times, in Britain, La Nación, in Argentina, and El Mercurio, in Chile. El Mercurio, the supposedly neutral party, had the highest estimate.
The New York Times reported in its June 16, 1982 report that police fired tear gas at thousands of protesters.
Police grabbing anyone. Shots being fired over protesters. The government led by a military dictatorship refusing to provide arrest figures. Reporters being injured. That would seem to support O’Reilly’s version of events and not Eric Engberg’s.
Now, if he had simply said, “I was in Buenos Aires during the Revolution . . .”
But I can’t see him saying that. Not his style. Might be taken as celebrating a revolution against a RW military dictatorship.