O'Reilly claims 'tent city' story is 'bogus' -- with his own bogus 'facts'
Bill O'Reilly's been on a jag the past couple of months claiming that the mainstream media are dying on the vine because of their "far left" bias, which he think is killing them economically. Last night on his Talking Points Memo segment, he continued this thesis by pointing to a couple of cases.
The first is the swine flu story, which he says so confused him and his staff they just didn't report on it. So up front, we get an admission these may not be the sharpest journalistic tools in the shed.
Then he continues:
O'Reilly: Second example: In early March, reports out of Sacramento, California, said a very important story was a homeless camp featuring hundreds of people damaged by the recession, was a very important situation.
[video clip]
O'Reilly: Wow! Can you believe it?
Guess what? Story's bogus!
The Economist magazine, a British publication, writes, quote: "the tent city had actually been around for close to a decade. There may have been a foreclosed homeowner or two among its denizens, but ... almost all of the people there have problems with mental health, drug abuse or both."
Again, it took a British magazine to tell the truth about a false story generated by the U.S. media.
But if you actually read read the Economist piece, you can see clearly that its intent is not to "debunk" the "tent city" story but to argue that it's not important.
It attempts this with a shoddy and shallow piece of reporting; if the writer was only able to find "one or two" foreclosed homeowners among the tent city residents, he wasn't trying very hard. Indeed, he likely wasn't looking at all; MSNBC's Chris Jansing (in the piece O'Reilly clips) was able to interview three of them for her piece. Indeed, a more honest journalistic effort -- such as that from the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago -- makes clear that it's a complex story, but there's no question that the recession is a major driver in the very real expansion of California's homeless population.
As for the camp having existed in some form or another in that locale for some time, that in fact had already been widely reported -- including by, among others, O'Reilly's arch-nemesis, the New York Times -- over a month ago:
