Bill O'Reilly lies.

Thanks, Con. I'm going to present more examples in this round and begin arguments in defense of these being lies in the next round. *** 6. After Sen. Tom Coburn said that Fox lied about the possibility of going to jail if you didn't buy health insurance, O'Reilly attacked Coburn, NBC and those crazy far-left liberals for "falsely accusing" Fox of scaring Americans with that lie. In his interview with Coburn, O'Reilly asks, "Can you tell me one person on Fox News - just one - who has told this audience that they'll go to jail if they don't buy health insurance? You don't know anybody at Fox News because there hasn't *been* anyone that said people will go to jail..." He continued "WE RESEARCHED IF *ANYBODY* AT FOX NEWS EVER SAID YOU WERE GOING TO JAIL IF YOU DON'T BUY HEALTH INSURANCE -- NOBODY'S *EVER* SAID IT -- SO IT SEEMS TO ME THAT WHAT YOU DID WAS USE FOX NEWS AS A WHIPPING BOY WHEN WE DIDN'T QUALIFY THERE." Of course this was a blatant lie considering Fox had pushed the lie about jail many times. For a transcript of the times that Fox news lied about this policy -- including on O'Reilly's own show -- check this source ( http://mediamatters.org... ). Now, there's ample evidence O'Reilly blatantly lied here, and another media watchdog even acknowledges how this should not be confused as a "mistake" ( http://mediamatters.org... ). Journalist Karl Frisch rightly points out, "First, O'Reilly essentially accused a U.S. Senator of making things up when in fact it was O'Reilly himself that was wrong. Second, O'Reilly has been directly contradicted [regarding the lie/research] by one of his colleagues, Neil Cavuto. And third, rather than correcting the public record with an apology to Coburn and moving on, O'Reilly has dug in even deeper with more lies on the subject." (To watch Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and a bunch of other uninformed Fox-ites lie to the American public - YouTube source: Bill O'Reilly LIES LIES LIES about Fox News & Health Care Reform) http://www.youtube.com... 7. U.S. Department of Agriculture Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign after a conservative activist posted a video clip of Sherrod's speech at an NAACP dinner on his website BigGovernment.com in which she appeared to say that she had once discriminated against a white farmer. The edited clip did not include the portion of the speech in which Sherrod said the episode had taught her the importance of overcoming personal prejudices. O'Reilly was the first on cable to air the video, calling for Sherrod's resignation. Afterward when the true nature of the context appeared in full, Sherrod blamed O'Reilly and the likes of Fox News for hyping the story without checking out the facts. O'Reilly later said on his show, "I owe Ms. Sherrod an apology for not doing my homework, for not putting her remarks into the proper context." He admitted that he did not examine the entire transcript. However, he also continued to condemn Sherrod's comments on his show saying she made a mistake, even after it had emerged that her words had been misrepresented ( http://latimesblogs.latimes.com... ). 8. After having the good sense to apologize to Sherrod, O'Reilly told Leno that this was the first and only time he's had to apologize in 13 years. This of course was a lie; in addition to apologizing to Rick Sanchez and CNN for the lie I presented in the last round, he's had to apologize several other times. Now is this an honest mistake? Is he just such an insincere person that he can't even remember he's made more than one mistake? Hmm. http://tinyurl.com... 9. O'Reilly said (condescendingly) to his guest, "We didn't invade Iraq... It was a declaration of war, it was a declaration to enforce the first Gulf War Treaty which you don't know anything about, Mr. Ballentine." Of course the U.S. has in fact invaded Iraq -- the U.S. military forcefully entered the country in order to overthrow that nation's leader, a.k.a. an invasion. Think Progress reports that during a 2006 speech, President Bush discussed his administration's "two major invasions as a part of the war on terror." Even O'Reilly himself has admitted that the United States invaded Iraq: a) "I'll submit that most folks still have no idea why the Bush administration invaded Iraq." [1/28/08] b) "Iraq was invaded to create a friendly country between Iran and Syria, thereby pressuring those nations into a more sensible foreign policy." [3/6/06] Additionally, O'Reilly's "first Gulf War Treaty" claim is also questionable. During a March 2004 interview with former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, O'Reilly was challenged on this claim. O'Reilly says, "But do you understand that when you have 17 violations of a treaty, a war treaty, that you basically have to take action?" Blix responded, "Well, you're talking about a war treaty. It was a cease-fire. It was not a war treaty." Either way, here we see more direct contradictions produced by O'Reilly himself. (YouTube source: O'Reilly: "We Didn't Invade Iraq") http://thinkprogress.org... http://www.youtube.com... 10. O'Reilly says that there "are not many homeless veterans out there" in his criticism of John Edwards for taking a strong stance on the issue. In fact there are about 195,000 homeless veterans according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. Now my opponent can play semantics and assert that 195k "isn't many" but I think the truth is obvious: O'Reilly just makes things up he knows nothing about in order to sound like he has a strong, intelligent argument when really most of the time he's just talking nonsense and misrepresenting facts. http://www.youtube.com... (YouTube source: Bill O'Reilly denies that homeless vets exist) 11. Here I'll be using video clips from one particular source to demonstrate O'Reilly lying on various topics (YouTube source: Bill O'Reilly lying with rebuttal). Basically he denies that Fox News has talking points encouraged by management at FNC and denies that they are trying to promote particular agenda. This is directly contradicted by former Fox employees Larry Johnson, Jon Du Pre and others in the clip, in addition to the copies of the memos that were released by Fox demonstrating blatant bias. Now, if my opponent denies that these memos are legit I will link him to sources proving that they WERE actual memos released from Fox, and that nobody at Fox ever denied the memos (instead they claimed that the biased ones were just cherry picked from the bunch). http://www.youtube.com... 12. O'Reilly says "We [Fox] put MORE liberals on the air than conservatives. We have a tally every day of what we put on. We put more liberal voices on the air than conservatives." At the time, a FAIR Study of Special Report with Brit Hume (which my opponent feels is the best and most fair representation of non-biased news that Fox has to offer) shows Republican guests outnumber Democrats 5 to 1. FAIR's study looked at 25 weeks of Special Report 's one-on-one interviews (6/30/03–12/19/03) finding 101 guests -- 72% were Republican. FAIR reports The five-to-one conservative-to-progressive imbalance is actually a marked improvement from FAIR's 2002 study, which found that "left-of-center" guests (3%) were outnumbered 14 to one. In short, this was another huge lie. http://www.fair.org... 13. O'Reilly said Howard Kuntz lied about O'Reilly's viewers (he said 3M); O'Reilly maintains he gets 5 million viewers a night - close to Katie Couric's rating. Actually Kuntz was the one telling the truth and O'Reilly lied on both accounts. http://tinyurl.com... /Characters -- Again, rebuttal in the next round!