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Why the Bill O'Reilly charges aren't sticking

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly almost certainly exaggerated his experiences during the Falklands War and its aftermath in 1982, as several CBS News staffers who were with him at the time attest. He wasn't actually in a "war zone" or "combat situation," as he has often said, but instead at a violent protest. No one appears to have been killed during the riot, despite his claim that "many people died." He was certainly not on the Falkland Islands.

So: Why isn't O'Reilly, the highest-rated host on cable news, being subjected to an internal investigation or an unpaid six-month suspension? Some of it is due to his immediate -- and passionate -- dismissal of the charges (a case study in PR). Some of it is due to the fact that, as a partisan pundit rather than a nightly news anchor, the expectations are lower. But most of the blame lays at the feet of Mother Jones.

The journalists who raised the red flags on O'Reilly's statements -- David Corn and Daniel Schulman, of Mother Jones -- started at a disadvantage. These 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.)

But Corn and Schulman made O'Reilly's job even easier. Their report, titled "Bill O'Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem," promised to deliver conclusive evidence of Choppergate-level sins. Surely, O'Reilly had committed some indesputable fabrication. The promised whopper was in the subhead: "The Fox News host has said he was in a 'war zone' that apparently no American correspondent reached."

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. "I was not on the Falkland Islands and I never said I was," O'Reilly told the On Media blog last week. That hasn't really been disputed since.

Instead, the debate has shifted to whether or not O'Reilly was actually in "a war zone" or a "combat situation," as he has repeatedly claimed. Well, no, he wasn't. He was present at a violent protest -- or "a riot," or "a demonstration" -- that took place immediately after the conclusion of the war. This is a major embellishment, defensible only under the most forgiving parameters of what constitutes wartime activity. Whatever the case, an embellishment is not going to lead Roger Ailes to fire his most valuable personnel asset. (The network has said that "Fox News Chairman and C.E.O. Roger Ailes and all senior management are in full support of Bill O'Reilly.")

There is one detail in Mother Jones' account that is rather damning: In his book, O'Reilly writes that "many were killed" during the riot. The CBS News report from the riot does not mention any deaths. The former CBS News staffers who spoke with CNN over the weekend likewise claimed that no one died during the riots. "There were certainly no dead people," Jim Forrest, a sound engineer for CBS in Buenos Aires, told CNN's Brian Stelter. "Had there been dead people, they would have sent more camera crews." Manny Alvarez, a cameraman called the claims of deaths "outrageous," and added: "People being mowed down? Where was that? That would have been great footage. That would have turned into the story."

The trouble is, it's probably too late for that to matter. Corn and Schulman picked the wrong battle. They chose to highlight claims that could be argued away on semantics, instead of focusing on matters that could be fact-checked by the absence of reported fatalities. In short, they buried the lead. And because O'Reilly punched holes in the other parts of their argument, it has become all the harder to make the legitimate charges stick.