General Discussion

Adenoid_Hynkel

(14,093 posts) Wed Feb 25, 2015, 01:34 AM Feb 2015

Former CBS newsman Engberg hits back at a O'Reilly in new rebuttal 2/24

Just posted on Facebook a few hours ago:

Last night Bill O'Reilly presented his on-air grand rejoinder to declarations by a dozen newsmen, including myself, that his portrayal in interviews and publications of a street riot he covered in Buenos Aires at the end of the Falklands War as dangerous "combat" was muzzy hokum. I'm afraid his carefully plotted defense raised more questions than it answered about O'Reilly's moment in the "War Zone."

With his usual car salesman's flourish, O'Reilly played for viewers excerpts of the 1982 reports carried on the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather" the day after the disturbance in question. It was excellent, dramatic footage of a riot. It should be. The CBS Buenos Aires camera crews were among the best I ever saw. The report on the show, as is always the case with a network story, was a fusion of the most outstanding pictures taken by all the cameramen who were working on the story, in this case five in number. What the completed story thus showed was a speeded-up version of the actual event -- kind of like a "Sports Center" re-cap of one night's Major League baseball action. I think everyone understands that. No doubt it was a scary event. But it was over in two hours and everyone went home. Furthermore, the video of people chanting, police firing tear gas and arresting demonstrators is not "combat," and a reporter who is on the scene is not a "war correspondent." Not even close.
While we're on the subject of reporters who were on the scene, one of the voices heard on the CBS tape played by O'Reilly was my own. Why was I included in the story? Because I had covered the riot. Strong evidence, I suggest that O'Reilly's claim to being alone on the story because the rest of the CBS correspondent corps was hiding in their hotel rooms out of fear is bunk. Why would he say such a thing if untrue? Because he'll say anything to advance his own agenda. He also hates network correspondents because he couldn't be one.

More important, the CBS video he showed -- and remember this tape included the most newsworthy, exciting pictures from five camera crews -- does not show troops firing guns into the crowd or the bodies of dead and wounded on the ground. O'Reilly has repeatedly said he saw such firing, a claim denied by a score of real journalists who were there. Not even the Buenos Aires tabloid press, which had a reputation for hyping everything, claimed that troops had fired into crowds. O'Reilly is all alone on this issue. The video undercut rather than supported his claims.

After showing the 33-year old video, O'Reilly next produced his key witness, Don Brown, the NBC executive in charge of Latin American coverage at the time of the Falklands War and the riot which O'Reilly is trying to inflate into a case of "combat." Brown, interviewed by phone, proceeded to display a colossal ignorance of events that unfolded inside Argentina at the end of the Falklands war. His comments appeared to be tailored to make O'Reilly look like a reporter serving in a "war-like zone." But it seemed obvious to me that Brown had not been in the country at the time. No one could be so ill-informed otherwise. "As the war went badly," he said, "there were demonstrations every day. There were tanks in the street." Wrong on both counts. Especially on the tanks. "As the military were losing badly," Brown intoned, "the populace began to turn on the military leadership." Nothing like that happened. There wasn't a reaction to losing the war until it was lost. Brown hadn't even checked Wikipedia or Youtube.

Read the rest at:
https://www.facebook.com/eric.j.engberg/posts/10204901509874849