FOX's Bill O'Reilly threatens to 'come after' NY Times reporter if she doesn't say what he wants about his 'war zone' claims
The Fox News host reportedly threatened a New York Times reporter who was writing about allegations that O'Reilly misled people by saying he has reported from a war zone.
From the Times:
During a phone conversation, [O'Reilly] told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter's coverage was inappropriate. 'I am coming after you with everything I have,' Mr. O'Reilly said. 'You can take it as a threat.'
O'Reilly has denied embellishing stories from his time covering the Falklands War in Argentina.
Some of O'Reilly's former colleagues have accused him of exaggerating the danger he and others were in while covering protests in Argentina.
O'Reilly's wrote in his book that "many were killed" in a 1982 riot in Argentina, but other reporters who were there say no civilians were killed.
In an interview on Fox's Mediabuzz show, O'Reilly pointed to a New York Times story from the time that said a policeman "pulled a pistol" and fired five shots during a protest. But he left out the part of the sentence that notes the shots were fired "over the heads of fleeing demonstrators," as the Times reporter who wrote the story pointed out on Facebook on Monday.
"What I saw on the streets that night was a demonstration - passionate, chaotic and memorable - but it would be hard to confuse it with being in a war zone," Rich Meislin, the Times reporter, said in his Facebook post.
O'Reilly said he was just reading clips from the Times piece and that official casualty reports were hard to come by, according to the Times.
While he was covering the Falklands War, O'Reilly was reportedly stationed in Buenos Aires, which was more than 1,000 miles from the actual conflict zone, according to CNN.
Mother Jones first highlighted discrepancies in O'Reilly's retellings of his time in Argentina last week.
O'Reilly has said that he didn't embellish anything and called the Mother Jones report "irresponsible." He accused the magazine of trying to "smear" him and called it "the bottom rung of journalism in America." Fox News released a statement saying the network is in "full support" of O'Reilly.
The O'Reilly accusations come shortly after NBC News anchor Brian Williams was dealt a six-month suspension for exaggerating stories from his coverage of the Iraq invasion.
Business Insider has reached out to Fox for comment and will update this story when we hear back.