Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Here's what O'Reilly called us--and why we're proud of it.

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7:18 PM (18 minutes ago)

MoJo Reader,

It's official: Bill O'Reilly is out at Fox News. This comes in the wake of reports of multiple sexual harassment complaints against him, as well as a social-media push for a boycott against his show. You can read more about those developments here.

For us at Mother Jones, though, one element of the O'Reilly saga jumps out: How consistently he (and Fox News) denied not only the harassment allegations, but his journalistic missteps. O'Reilly has also violated basic standards in a way that would end the careers of many other journalists. Perhaps the most memorable of these episodes involved his repeated claims that he had been in 'war zones' and 'combat.'

In 2015, MoJo's David Corn and Daniel Schulman broke the story that while O'Reilly's has said he was 'in the Falklands' during the 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina, and that he saw 'combat' there, the closest he came to covering that conflict was a protest in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In response to the exhaustively researched article, O'Reilly called David a 'liar,' 'far-left assassin,' and 'despicable guttersnipe.'

What's so interesting about that moment is that it prefigured the 'post-truth' approach to the facts that we saw play out in the 2016 campaign: If you repeat an untruth loudly enough and often enough, some people will believe it. It will take on a life of its own. 'In a way, it's impossible to win a debate with O'Reilly,' David wrote presciently at the time, 'because he is not bound by reality.' So when the sexual harassment allegations—complete with detailed accounts by multiple women—came out: O'Reilly and Fox News both insisted that none of this could possibly have happened. (Notice the echoes of Trump and his friend, former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who have insisted that the women who accused them of harassment were making it up.)

But here's the thing that acolytes of the 'post-truth' school forget: The truth is slow, sometimes quiet, sometimes not aggressive enough. But it is tough as nails. Denying it doesn't make it go away; it just pushes it underground—for a while. Eventually, it will win out. And when the post-truthers of the world call reporters 'guttersnipes' for digging up the facts, we wear that badge with pride.

Sincerely,

Monika Bauerlein, Chief Executive Officer
Mother Jones