Does this apply to Ferguson as well?
Yes. If a reporter said that he covered the Ferguson “war zone”, I’d have no problem with that. Or the 1992 LA riots “war zone”. Again, no problem. Why, would you?
Under normal circumstances, I would have a small problem with this.
But this is key. If the LA riots had been in response to an actual war happening in, say, Iraq, and the reporter claimed during the Iraq War that he was reporting from the war zone, when he was in LA, I’d have a real big problem with it.
When there’s an actual war going on, and a reporter claims to be in the war zone when he’s reporting about the actual war, it’s understood that he’s actually where that war is happening, not hundreds of miles away.
“The war zone” or “a war zone”?
Again, is there an actual O’Reilly quote that you can cite that is being objected to?
Posted in the Fox thread too but:
So…people don’t get hurt when O’Reilly lies because they know/should know that he’s a paid liar.
But people get hurt when “hard-news” people lie because they’re expected to be telling the truth.
Here are some quotes:
If you refer to an active war zone in the Falklands, it is not reasonable to expect the reader to infer you mean a protest in Buenos Aires.
That said, I kind of agree with rock party. Nobody who’s paying any attention at all should take O’Reilly seriously: he’s kind of the king of the full-of-shit blowhards, clearly an entertainer for those who desire the children to vacate their lawn. Williams is different, and it’s appropriate to hold him to different standards.
If he was covering the situation in Buenos Aires and there was shooting and people killed, he can be excused calling it a “combat situation”. Saying “in Argentina during the Falkland war” is pretty accurate.
On the other hand, saying “in the Falklands” when he wasn’t there is a fib. No question about it.
“combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War” VERY heavily implies that the combat situation is part of the war. I mean, technically it could refer to a drunken bar fight in Buenos Aires, but it’s highly misleading phrasing.
But from what I read, there are no contemporaneous news accounts of shootings or killings in Buenos Aires when he was there.
Even during the actual Falklands fighting, Buenos Aires was never in the “war zone,” either by the declarations or actions of either side.
And where is O’Reilly’s subsequent claim that he meant a protest in Buenos Aires?
It don’t work when Howie Kurtz spins it and it don’t work when you do either.
ISTM that the key O’Reilly question is whether the events he described actually happened, not where he was located.
He is claiming he was in the midst of a thousand people storming the presidential palace and being shot at by the army. If this is true, then the fact that he wasn’t in the Falklands seems like a nitpick. If it’s not, then it’s a legitimate big deal.
I see that his description of the riots have also been challenged, so he may be as guilty as BW.
I’m not sure about that, to be honest–I’m relying on other folks here. The articles I read just cast severe doubt on the possibility of his being actually on the Falkland Islands at that time–they said that journalist access was very tightly controlled and was 100% British journalists.
A crucial difference between the BW controversy and this Bill O’Reilly thing:
Brian Williams never denied having told the tale about the helicopter and the RPG fire. Instead, he said, “I spent much of the weekend thinking I’d gone crazy,” which at least initially was consistent with the possibility of a false memory. (This became harder to believe after the confabulations became too many to count.)
Bill O’Reilly OTOH is denying having said things that are plainly in the public record as Bill O’Reilly statements. He’s flat-out lying without even trying to pass it off as an innocent mistake. I don’t think he needs to lose his job as an entertainer but he’s clearly even more of a hypocritical dickhead than I already thought he was.
This is Great Debates.
You’ve offered a strawman, by suggesting that my argument is identical to someone else’s and then (by proxy, no less) claiming that the other argument is disproved.
If you can refute anything I’m saying, I’d invite you to quote my post, and then type out your refutation.
I don’t know the specifics, to be sure, but my amateur sense of the issue is that a place big enough to house nearly 3,000 residents can’t be all that “tightly” controlled without more severe measures than I have heard of during the conflict.
I’d be convinced of that.
If you were to provide a link to such a statement, and a link to the plain public record in question.
Your link doesn’t show either of those things.
Does it?
I’m very surprised by this idea, that during an active war, the British Army would be unable to prevent reporters from coming in to a tiny island.
At this point, if you’re interested in specifics, I’d invite you to do some Googling. There are many articles online, and if you have specific questions, it’s much more efficient for you to do the preliminary research instead of continuing to ask me the questions and hoping I’ll go research the answers.
You are theorizing that at some time after arriving in Buenos Aires in 1982, he traveled hundreds of miles to the offshore war zone, by some clandestine private means (there being no active civilian connection with the mainland, and no facilitation for American journalists by either side), had dangerous escapades including “a combat situation” and “being chased by the army,” and then got out again… and he failed to tell any of this story in his own memoir, apart from the visit to B.A.?
This is very well put–I was thinking about his self-aggrandizing ways and the lack of any report of his sneaky self-smuggling, but you put it far more coherently than I did even in my head.