Bill Maher perplexed that both Fox News & the timid ‘liberal’ mainstream media ignores Bill O’Reilly lies.
Bill Maher called out Fox News and the traditional mainstream media, the so called liberal media, on his Real Time HBO show. He pointed out that even as Fox News loved the Hillary Clinton email faux scandal — “They were like a dog with a new chew toy,” they ignored the real scandal, the blatant lies dug up in print and in video told by Bill O’Reilly.
“Let me read to you Bill O’Reilly’s words and you tell me if he is not just a blatant bald ass liar,” Bill Maher said. “He said, ‘I’ve reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands.’ No you haven’t. There is no grey area here. War zone is where the war is going on. You were in the capital of a country that was at war. But the war was twelve hundred miles away. Two. Bill O’Reilly, ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ No. You saw pictures of that. Bill O’Reilly, ‘I’ve seen Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with .. .’ No again. You saw pictures of it. It’s not the same thing. I’ve seen pictures of the Hindenburg. I don’t say ‘I saw the Hindenburg go down.'”
Bill Maher then recounted one of his most blatant lies. He claimed he was the reporter who was there when one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s friends committed suicide by shooting himself. There is tape evidence that proves he was in Dallas talking to someone about making arrangements to fly to the scene in Florida.
“These are out and out lies,” Bill Maher said. “Now I understand why Fox News backs him because they are really not a news service. They are like ‘You expect the truth? That’s not what we do here.’ But why isn’t the mainstream media going after him with the same ferocity, the supposedly liberal media, as they did to Brian Williams?
“I suspect it is because they know what you just said which is Fox News isn’t a real news organization,” David Axelrod replied. “And Bill O’Reilly isn’t a real journalist.”
“Bill O’Reilly being full of shit about something isn’t a news story,” said Matt Taibbi”It just isn’t.”
That is the problem. The traditional mainstream media in not covering these lies and others on these issues is in itself a dereliction of their duty. While the elites know that Bill O’Reilly and Fox News are full of misinformation, their audience do not. It is the duty of the media to call them out. Then again, the mainstream media at large have their own problems with the dissemination of unreliable and misleading news.