Last night Bill O’Reilly mustered up his signature pomposity in a debate with Bob Beckel over whether or not NBC had ever criticized President Obama on the use of drones or even reported on the controversy. O’Reilly was almost shaking with contempt at what he considered an outrageous example of hypocrisy. Beckel didn’t seem to care much about NBC’s reporting or pretend that he knew anything about their coverage of this story. But O’Reilly was relentless about NBC’s reporting and refused to let it go.<\/p>\n
O’Reilly:<\/strong> “Remember the outcry about waterboarding? You know, everybody jumping up and down? Uh, NBC News, I thought they were going to, like, melt down over there. You heard anything on NBC about the drones? […] Neither have I. Neither has my staff.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
O’Reilly went on to accuse NBC of deliberately avoiding the story “because they are protecting the President.”<\/em> There’s only one small thing wrong with O’Reilly’s bombastic condemnation of NBC: It was NBC who broke the story<\/a> that made the drone controversy the lead on every news network on television. A little exclusive published by NBC’s investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff revealed the memo that outlined the administration’s rational for drone strikes targeted at American citizens.<\/p>\n
The intensity with which O’Reilly insisted that NBC was derelict in their reporting only made his egregious mangling of the facts all the more preposterous. And by explicitly affirming his mistaken assertions with his staff, he casts doubt on their competence as well. In that regard, this isn’t the first time that O’Reilly’s staff has let him down<\/a> in spectacular fashion. Back in April of 2010, O’Reilly reproached GOP senator Tom Coburn for suggesting that Fox had aired allegations that failure to get health insurance under ObamaCare would subject you to a prison term. He vigorously denied that anyone at Fox had ever said such a thing saying…<\/p>\n
O\u2019Reilly:<\/strong> “It doesn\u2019t happen here, and we\u2019ve researched to find out if anybody on Fox News has ever said ‘You\u2019re going to jail if you don\u2019t buy health insurance.’ Nobody\u2019s ever said it. So it seems to me what you did was, you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn\u2019t qualify there.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Unfortunately for O’Reilly and his crack research team, the video record was readily available (And this pretty hilarious stuff. The “jail”<\/em> assertion was even made on O’Reilly’s program by Glenn Beck):<\/p>\n