Bill O’Reilly: In The Cross-Hairs of Liberals [Opinion]

In this era of uber-partisanship, liberals across the country seem to be in a coordinated attack mode against Bill O’Reilly. The reason for this attack – O’Reilly has the nerve to work at Fox News. After the demise of Brian Williams at NBC, liberals have made it their mission to take O’Reilly down in an effort to discredit him.

The USA Today reports that Williams’s suspension was known at NBC on February 11. Mother Jones, a well-known liberal website and the instigator of this attack campaign, first put O’Reilly in the cross-hairs with an article they posted on February 19 as shown in the following screenshot.

This is not even about maintaining journalistic credibility or high standards. If it was about credibility and standards, then Mother Jones would have posted this story about O’Reilly long before Williams’s suspension and not eight days after it.

However, O’Reilly’s popularity at Fox News has given this attack the ability to last longer than it should. This is when other media outlets started to run pieces concerning this scandal.

As reported by Business Insider, the first issue is that O’Reilly exaggerated his “war-zone” reporting credentials during the 1982 Falklands War. Mother Jones then posted O’Reilly’s own video from 1982 as so-called proof that Bill was indeed lying to the same degree as Williams.

There are several things to realize about this proof. There are elements of violence in the protest that was aired. Rocks were thrown, people were clearly angry and so forth. The one thing which liberals want to hang their hat on with this video is there were no killings, which they feel would justify actual combat.

To respond to that, you also have to look at the context of the time frame. 1982 is very different from 2015. The airing of graphic violence of any sort would have never made it to air in 1982. In 2015, with the onset of cable news channels, it would have been all over every channel with the standard disclaimer about images being unsuitable for younger viewers. The standards were much different back then.

So, this proof is coming down to your definition of combat. The Huffington Post reports the definition of “combat” using its technical definition.

“… the technical definition of the term involves “fighting between armed forces” — i.e. the British and Argentine militaries …”

When reporting about the Ferguson riots, which were clashes between civilians and the police, the Huffington Post has described it as a “war zone,” “suited for foreign battlefields,” and wait for it – “combat.”

This is a coordinated attack by liberals to discredit a commentator. That’s right – I said commentator. There is a huge difference between Williams and O’Reilly.

Bill O’Reilly has not done any actual reporting of the news since he started with Fox News — he bloviates.

[Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images]