Factor Fiction: O'Reilly Makes Major Mistake… Again

Posted by David DeGraw at 8:17 AM on June 5, 2006.

Bill O'Reilly compared the alleged Haditha massacre in Iraq to the WWII massacre in Malmédy, Belgium, saying that U.S. forces killed unarmed SS forces who had their hands in the air. When, in fact, the complete opposite is true. It was the SS forces who killed unarmed U.S. soldiers. FOX News then tried to cover-up the mistake by changing the transcript to say "Normandy" instead of "Malmédy."

Excerpt from Keith Olbermann:

"Abraham Lincoln did not shoot John Wilkes Booth. Titanic did not sink a North Atlantic iceberg. And Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. These are simple historical facts intelligible to all adults, most children, and some of your more discerning domesticated animals. But not, as the third story on the Countdown proves yet again, not to Bill O."

"The guilty pleasure offered by the existence of Bill O'Reilly is simple and understandable. Ninety-nine times out of 100, when we belly up to the Bill O bar of bluster, nearly every time we partake of the movable falafel feast, he serves us nothing but comedy: farce, slapstick, unconscious self-mutilation, the Sideshow Bob of commentators forever stepping on the same rake, forever muttering the same grunted, inarticulate surrender, forever resuming the circle that will take him back to the same rake. The Sisyphus of morons, if you will. But this is the 100th time out of 100. It is not funny at all. Bill O'Reilly has, for the second time in just under eight months, slandered at least 84 dead American servicemen.… He has made these Americans into war criminals. They are dead and have been dead for 61 years. They cannot defend themselves against O'Reilly. We will have to do it for them."

David DeGraw is AlterNet's video blogger.