On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015

Media Matters: O’Reilly lied about Florida suicide

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has repeatedly lied about being present at the suicide of Lee Harvey Oswald associate George S. de Mohrenschildt, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters alleged in a new report on Tuesday.

In his book “Killing Kennedy” and in several other appearances, O’Reilly has said that as a reporter for the Dallas-based station WFAA-TV he was on the porch of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, when he heard de Mohrenschildt shoot himself with a shotgun in March 1977.

“At the time, de Mohrenschildt had been called to testify before a congressional committee looking into the events of November 1963. As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood. By the way, that reporter’s name is Bill O’Reilly,” O’Reilly wrote in the 2012 book.

Two former colleagues of O’Reilly’s at WFAA-TV, Byron Harris and Tracy Rowlett, told Media Matters O’Reilly was in Dallas at the time of de Mohrenschildt’s suicide.

Media Matters also points to the autobiography of Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who wrote that O’Reilly called him to ask about the assassination.

“About 6:30 that evening I received a call from Bill O’Reilly, a friend who was then a television reporter in Dallas. ‘Funny thing happened,’ he said. ‘We just aired a story that come over the wire about a Dutch journalist saying the Assassinations Committee has finally located de Mohrenschildt in South Florida. Now de Mohrenschildt’s attorney, a guy named Pat Russell, he calls and says de Mohrenschildt committed suicide this afternoon. Is that true?” Fonzi wrote.

Taped telephone conversations between Fonzi and O’Reilly also reportedly have O’Reilly telling Fonzi that he “has been trying to run down the story by telephone from Texas” but that he’d be heading to Florida to investigate it further.

Last week, Mother Jones journalists David Corn and Daniel Schulman alleged in a report that O'Reilly lied about being present in a "war zone" and "combat situation" during the Falklands War, and that he witnessed many people killed during violent demonstrations. O’Reilly has fiercely defended himself, addressing the issue on his show and going on the offensive, attacking Corn and Schulman and most recently threatening a New York Times reporter with repercussions if he felt her coverage was inappropriate.

But the controversy might be good for O’Reilly. His show on Monday night tracked up 3.32 million viewers and 568,000 viewers in the key demo as he addressed the controversy, doubling CNN’s and tripling MSNBC’s in the same hour.

A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from O’Reilly regarding the Media Matters report.