February 26, 2015

Bill O'Reilly has been in the middle of a hail storm against his own credibility with his previous work and Media Matters researched another one of BIll's claims and exposed it as false.

Bill O'Reilly has claimed repeatedly that he witnessed the execution of nuns while reporting in 1981 on the civil war in El Salvador, an apparent fabrication that is at odds with both history and what O'Reilly himself has said about arriving in the country after the event took place, according to new information unearthed by Media Matters.

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O'Reilly has spoken on several occasions about his time covering the Salvadoran civil war as a CBS correspondent in 1981, suggesting at least twice that he witnessed the murder of the churchwomen. On the September 27, 2005, edition of his talk-radio program The Radio Factor, O'Reilly said, "I've seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador." And on the December 14, 2012, edition of his Fox News show, O'Reilly spoke of telling his mother that "I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head."

However, O'Reilly could not possibly have witnessed the murder of the churchwomen if his own timeline is to be believed. The former CBS correspondent only arrived in El Salvador in 1981, as he mentioned on the February 22, 2002, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, saying (according to Nexis transcript), "Before I went to El Salvador in 1981, I talked with some experienced Latin American experts, people who had seen the brutal wars down there for themselves. I had never been in a war zone before, so I wanted some prep."

Once these new allegations surfaced, Bill O'Reilly emailed Mediaite and responded to the claims by saying he was refering only to images he had seen.

UPDATE — 7:27 p.m. ET: In response to the allegations put forward by Media Matters, Bill O’Reilly submitted the following statement to Mediaite. He claims that when he referred to seeing nuns “get shot in the back of the head,” he was referring to images and not the actual events in person.
O’Reilly states:

“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered. The mention of the nuns on my program came the day of the Newtown massacre (December 14, 2012). The segment was about evil and how hard it is for folks to comprehend it. 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.”

Nice try Bill, but that's not what you said at all. Any reporter worth his salt would have said he'd seen images instead of making it appear that you witnessed it first hand.

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