NBC‘s Brian Williams exaggerates the dangers he faced while reporting on a couple of stories and gets suspended for half a year. Fox News‘ Bill O’Reilly does the exact same thing and nothing happens to him. What gives?

Could it be that News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is a deeply unethical institution with much lower journalistic standards even than Comcast, which owns NBC?

Nah–that can’t be it!

At least, that seems to be the assumption of Politico media reporter Dylan Byers (2/23/15), who explores the supposedly mysterious question of why Fox executives let their most lucrative on-air personality get away with blatantly misrepresenting his journalistic history.

“Some of it is due to his immediate–and passionate–dismissal of the charges (a case study in PR),” writes Byers. Coyly, the link that he put in that sentence goes to his own piece in Politico (2/19/15) that allowed O’Reilly to attack Mother Jones reporter David Corn as a “despicable guttersnipe,” and dismiss his article charging O’Reilly with fabrication as a “piece of garbage,” with no effort made by Byers to see whether its charges were true or not. It is a case study in PR: When under attack, be sure to take your counterattack to a media outlet that will pass it along without question.

Byers goes on: “Some of it is due to the fact that, as a partisan pundit rather than a nightly news anchor, the expectations are lower.” That’s closer to the truth, though it’s not being a partisan pundit that gets you held to a lower standard–remember when MSNBC suspended Keith Olbermann for making political contributions, and fired Phil Donahue for being anti-war at the time of the Iraq invasion?–but rather being specifically a conservative pundit.

But that’s not really why O’Reilly isn’t facing any consequences for his misrepresentation, says Byers: Instead, “most of the blame lays at the feet of Mother Jones.”

How so? Mother Jones reporters Corn and Daniel Schulman, writes Byers,

weren’t war veterans who felt wronged by O’Reilly’s portrayal of events. They were liberal reporters at an admittedly liberal magazine going after the paragon of right-wing punditry. No matter what goods they had on O’Reilly, it would be easy for him to dismiss these detractors as left-wing zealots bent on his destruction (which he did.)

Yes, “easy for him”–as long as media reporters like Byers (who links to himself again) allow themselves to be distracted by O’Reilly’s redbaiting and frame well-documented charges of fabrication as an ideological he said/she said.

It’s worth pausing here to note the essential asymmetry of the media terrain: It’s impossible to imagine a centrist reporter like Byers explaining that serious charges against a left-wing media personality were not taken seriously by his colleagues because they came from a right-wing source–unless he was beating up on the press for having a left-wing bias. When journalists do the reverse, though, it’s treated as normal and understandable that the press demonstrates a bias against the left and in favor of the right.

But aside from being inherently not worth listening to because it’s progressive, Mother Jones is to blame for criticizing O’Reilly for saying that he was “in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands,” when he never went to the Falklands. Byers totally swallows O’Reilly’s spin that when he said he was “in the Falklands,” he didn’t think anyone would think he meant he was IN the FALKLANDS. Here’s Byers:

Had O’Reilly falsely claimed to have been on the Falkland Islands when he wasn’t, the Fox News host might be in serious trouble. But he never really said that. He has said that he was “in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands,” which can reasonably be defended as short-hand for “in the Falklands War”–especially because O’Reilly has oft described his experiences there as taking place in Buenos Aires.

Byers really should give lessons in PR. When O’Reilly said, “I’ve reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands,” one would naturally assume that he meant he had “reported on the ground…in the Falklands,” because that’s where the “active war zone” was. There was no war in Buenos Aires, because British forces never attacked the mainland–and in any case, O’Reilly arrived there after the war was over.

But Byers is willing to accept that O’Reilly’s claim that he covered post-war riots in Argentina, and a riot is a kind of war, is merely a “major embellishment,” and “an embellishment is not going to lead Roger Ailes to fire his most valuable personnel asset.” As if anything short of sacrificing a goat to Satan on live TV was going to lead Ailes to fire his most valuable asset.

“There is one detail in Mother Jones‘ account that is rather damning,” Byers allows; “In his book, O’Reilly writes that “many were killed” during the riot,” and this doesn’t appear in the footage CBS aired of the protests or in anyone else’s recollection.

“The trouble is, it’s probably too late for that to matter,” says Byers. Too late? He just said it was “in Mother Jones‘ account”! How could the magazine have brought it up earlier than in its first article on the subject?

What Byers means is that the magazine’s Corn and Schulman

chose to highlight claims that could be argued away on semantics…. Because O’Reilly punched holes in the other parts of their argument, it has become all the harder to make the legitimate charges stick.

O’Reilly “punched holes” in their argument, remember, by saying that no one would assume “in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands” meant that he was in a war zone in the Falklands. And, therefore, no one need watch a 26-second video to see whether it was true or false when O’Reilly claimed:

The Argentine army pulled up in giant trucks, came out with guns and opened fire on the crowd. The video shows that; it’s on the Internet, you can see it. We shot it…. Soldiers shooting at people who were trying to overthrow the government.

Here, take a look at it right now and see if you can see any of that:

But in Byers’ view, it doesn’t matter that Mother Jones put that O’Reilly quote and the video that refutes it right next to each other in the story that called attention to O’Reilly’s Falklands fabrications.* The magazine expected that journalists evaluating its critique of O’Reilly would absorb more than just the headline; that’s an unrealistic expectation to have of reporters’ intellectual ambitions, Byers asserts when he lays “most of the blame…at the feet of Mother Jones.”

Media critics are sometimes accused, unfairly, of having a low opinion of journalists as a class. You’d be hard-pressed to find a media critic with as low an opinion of journalists as Dylan Byers.

*There’s also another article, by Greg Grandin in The Nation (2/9/15), that has another video clip, from an O’Reilly report from El Salvador, that O’Reilly misrepresents in similar up-is-down fashion. But Byers certainly wouldn’t expect journalists to read two articles before making a judgment on O’Reilly truthfulnesss.