Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly has pointed to his brief stint in Latin America in 1982 as a correspondent for CBS News as proof of his experience covering “active war zones.” Those claims have come under fire this month after reports in The Nation, Mother Jones and elsewhere exposed inconsistencies between O’Reilly’s reporting and his descriptions in books and media appearances of the threats he faced.
But historians who focus on the region and other experts say the bigger problem with O’Reilly’s reporting from El Salvador is that he failed to cover the story he was sent to do.
In A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, an autobiography published in 2008, O’Reilly writes that the CBS bureau chief sent him to El Salvador “to check out an alleged massacre in the dangerous Morazán territory,” which O’Reilly incorrectly describes as “a mountainous region bordering Nicaragua.” (It borders Honduras.)
The bureau chief was almost certainly referring to the slaying of hundreds of civilians suspected of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas, including children and at least one pregnant woman, by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran military in El Mozote and its surrounding villages in December 1981.
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“There were some very brave journalists at the time in El Salvador, but there were others that were not as brave,” Garrard-Burnett told HuffPost. “They weren’t all the same kind of free and independent thinkers that you might wish. They weren’t all questioning government sources … I don’t want to make it sound like I’m giving Bill O’Reilly a walk, but there were a lot of people there who were lazy back then, or scared.”
Raymond Bonner, one of the three journalists who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre, told HuffPost he had been following the news about O’Reilly’s stint as a correspondent in Latin America and found it “somewhat bemusing.”
“They must be loving it [at Fox News],” Bonner said. “Look at all the attention he’s getting.”
