Fox News stands by Bill O'Reilly

If Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has a “Brian Williams problem,” as his detractors hope, it may be one with a different outcome.

In a statement Sunday, a spokesperson for the cable channel said, “Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes and all senior management are in full support of Bill O’Reilly,” according to The New York Times.


O’Reilly is contesting accusations that he has repeatedly exaggerated his war-reporting experience.

An article by Mother Jones last week claimed that O’Reilly has misled audiences with multiple accounts about his experience reporting for CBS News during the 1982 Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina, and in El Salvador.

O’Reilly never set foot in a war zone like the one he described, the article by Mother Jones asserts, featuring quotes from his CBS contemporaries.

“Nobody got to the war zone during the Falklands war,” CBS News producer Susan Zirinsky told the magazine, adding that the military junta in Argentina prevented American reporters from getting to the islands.

“I never said I was on the Falkland Islands,” O’Reilly said on “The O’Reilly Factor” last Friday. “I said I covered the Falklands, which is what I did.”

“This is such a smear, it is unbelievable,” O’Reilly told Fox News’ Howard Kurtz on his “MediaBuzz” program Sunday.

But since Mother Jones published its article, others have come forward to criticize O’Reilly’s version of events.

Another former colleague pushed back on O’Reilly’s accounts late last week in a lengthy Facebook post.

Eric Engberg, a former CBS News correspondent who covered the aftermath of the Falklands conflict from Buenos Aires, said that O’Reilly’s story about covering a protest in the Argentine capital wasn’t accurate, adding that it was a “relatively tame riot” after Argentina surrendered to the British on the islands.

“It was an ‘expense account zone,’” Engberg wrote.

O’Reilly responded to the post on Sunday, reading from a contemporary New York Times dispatch that recounted police using tear gas to disperse “thousands of angry Argentines who had massed in front of the presidential palace.” Engberg said that the Fox News host’s story about his cameraman getting run down and “bleeding from the ear” could have happened only during that event.

“I don’t think he was there. I don’t think he knows what happened,” O’Reilly said of Engberg, adding that he had requested the video of the protest from CBS News.

CBS News confirmed to Deadline that it is in the process of locating video of the incident O’Reilly is referencing.