Publisher Won't Correct O'Reilly Book's Northern Ireland Bombings Lie
Written by Joe Strupp
Published
The publisher of a Bill O'Reilly book in which he falsely claims to have seen terrorists kill civilians with bombs in Northern Ireland are standing behind the Fox News host despite an admission by Fox News that he only saw photos of those events.
David Drake, senior vice president and deputy publisher at Crown Publishing Group, wrote in an email to Media Matters that “Crown will continue to publish our author's book just as he wrote it.”
That book is Keep it Pithy: Useful Observations In A Tough World, O'Reilly's 2013 work published under Crown Archetype, a division of Random House.
In the book, O'Reilly writes, “I've seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”
But last Friday, The Washington Post's Paul Farhi reported that Fox News admitted that O'Reilly was not an eyewitness to terrorist bombings in Northern Ireland, writing: “Asked about O'Reilly's statements Friday, a Fox News spokesman said that O'Reilly was not an eyewitness to any bombings or injuries in Northern Ireland. Instead, he was shown photos of bombings by Protestant police officers.”
Drake declined to offer further comment on why the publisher would not seek to correct an obvious misleading statement.
The Keep It Pithy issue is the latest in a string of revelations in which O'Reilly has been found to have inflated or fabricated claims about his reporting exploits.