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Media | News Analysis NY TIMES

Bill O’Reilly and Fox News: They’re in It Together

By JONATHAN MAHLER and EMILY STEEL

The Fox News host Bill O’Reilly aggressively defended his Falklands coverage earlier in his career after reports surfaced that he had embellished stories about his war reporting.

Hours after the news broke that Brian Williams had misrepresented his account of a helicopter trip in Iraq, he issued an on-air apology. NBC News started an investigation, and within days had suspended Mr. Williams, calling his actions "wrong and completely inappropriate."

When Mother Jones reported that Bill O’Reilly had engaged in self-aggrandizing rhetoric about his coverage of the Falklands war, he called one of the authors of the article "an irresponsible guttersnipe" and used his nightly show to fight back against his accusers. His bosses at Fox News, including the chief executive, Roger Ailes, rallied to his defense.

Fox’s handling of the controversy says a lot about the network. It also says a lot about its most visible star, a man who perhaps more than any other has defined the parameters and tenor of Fox News, in the process ushering in a new era of no-holds-barred, intentionally divisive news coverage.

Since dethroning CNN’s Larry King as the king of cable news almost 14 years ago, Mr. O’Reilly has helped transform a start-up news channel into a financial juggernaut, with estimated annual profits of more than $1 billion. He and Fox News have risen not on the back of big interviews or high-impact investigations but on the pugnacious brand of conservatism personified by Mr. O’Reilly.

"Bill’s credibility with his audience is not based on his record as a traditional journalist," said Jonathan Klein, a former president of CNN/U.S. "His credibility, in the view of his fans, is based on his trenchant analysis of the events of the day, his pulling no punches, his willingness to call it like it is."

There are other differences between the two controversies. The incident at the center of Mr. O’Reilly’s occurred more than 30 years ago; Mr. Williams’s happened in 2003. And his accusers are journalists, not military veterans as they were in Mr. Williams’s case. But the most meaningful point of distinction — and the reason Mr. O’Reilly’s job is almost certainly safe — is that he is not an anchorman, with all of the cultural weight that title carries. He’s a professional provocateur.

The accusations against Mr. O’Reilly, which have since been substantiated by other journalists in Argentina at the time, have played neatly into the network’s narrative of being the conservative outlier in an industry dominated by liberals.

"Fox News has a market; the market is people who don’t trust the news media," said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. "That strategy requires personalities like Bill O’Reilly to be under attack from the rest of the news media. When something like this flares up, it gets incorporated into a programming strategy."

David Corn, one of the authors of the Mother Jones article and a former Fox News contributor, said he received the tip about Mr. O’Reilly the day after NBC News announced its suspension of Mr. Williams for six months without pay. According to Mr. Corn’s source, Mr. O’Reilly had repeatedly made false claims about his experience covering the Falklands war as a young CBS News correspondent.

Mr. Corn and Daniel Schulman, the other reporter on the article, soon discovered what Mr. Corn describes as a pattern of misrepresentation in Mr. O’Reilly’s statements about his experiences in the Falklands.

Last Thursday, the two Mother Jones reporters emailed a Fox News spokeswoman a list of questions. The first one read: "In numerous instances — on his television and radio shows and in his book, ‘The No Spin Zone’ — Bill O’Reilly has said that he was in a ‘war zone’ during the Falklands war when he was a correspondent at CBS News. But it appears no American correspondents were allowed in the Falkland Islands war zone during the conflict. How does Mr. O’Reilly explain his comments?"

Fox did not respond. Mr. O’Reilly has since said that he never claimed he had reported from the Falkland Islands, where the fighting occurred. "I said I covered the Falklands war, which I did," he said last Friday. He went on to describe his coverage of protests in the aftermath of the war on the streets of Buenos Aires, more than 1,000 miles from the Falklands.

In the days after the Mother Jones article was published, Mr. O’Reilly mounted an aggressive campaign against the article and its authors on Fox, and aired a video clip and an interview with a former NBC journalist that he said supported his version of events. He also threatened a New York Times reporter that he would come after her "with everything I have" if he deemed her reporting unfair. "I don’t want you to get hurt," he said. "This is as serious as it gets."

This is not the first time that Mr. O’Reilly or a member of his staff tried to intimidate a journalist. On Tuesday, the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel wrote about being verbally accosted by one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers after she criticized Mr. O’Reilly for implying that a young woman who had been raped was partly to blame.

In an interview on Monday about his Falklands reporting, Mr. O’Reilly defended his accounts. "Every single thing I said is true," he said. Fox News did not make Mr. O’Reilly or Mr. Ailes available for this article.

Other reports have since emerged questioning some of Mr. O’Reilly’s other assertions. Most notably, Media Matters has challenged Mr. O’Reilly’s claims that he was outside the Palm Beach, Fla., home of an acquaintance of Lee Harvey Oswald when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1977.

Mr. O’Reilly has been ensnared in controversy before. In 2004, he was sued by a former "O’Reilly Factor" producer for sexual harassment. The suit was settled about two weeks after it was filed.

He has long fashioned himself as a kind of embattled underdog, a product of working-class Long Island who felt out of place at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government — where he earned a graduate degree — and at Washington dinner parties.

For years he was a low-profile TV news journeyman doing stints in Denver, Dallas, Hartford and Scranton, Pa., before joining CBS News in New York. Mr. O’Reilly invariably chafed against the constraints of traditional TV news and often quarreled with management.

In 1986, Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, hired Mr. O’Reilly after hearing him deliver a eulogy at the funeral of a mutual friend. Five years later, with his career at ABC News seemingly stalled, Mr. O’Reilly left the network to join "Inside Edition" as a correspondent and anchor. He brought an edge and point of view to the syndicated tabloid show.

Then, in 1996, Mr. Ailes, impressed by the Mr. O’Reilly’s brash assertiveness, gave him his own show on his new, 24-hour cable news network, Fox News Channel. "And, by the way, everyone advised me not to," Mr. Ailes later reflected. "Because he had been in the business 25 years, and he was never a star."

That changed quickly at Fox. Liberated from the shackles of network propriety and given a Democratic president embroiled in scandal, Mr. O’Reilly channeled his combative, partisan nature into a hit show. Soon he had moved from 6 p.m. to prime time, and was toppling a variety of better-known hosts on competing networks, including Mr. King.

"Larry King loved everybody and Bill O’Reilly doesn’t love anybody," said the journalist Michael Kinsley, a former co-host of CNN’s "Crossfire." "The truth is I sort of prefer the second. It makes for better television." (Mr. O’Reilly once said Mr. Kinsley would not understand an argument he was making about detainees’ rights on Guantánamo Bay until terrorists "cut off his head.")

"The O’Reilly Factor" is a big moneymaker for Fox, bringing in more than $100 million in advertising revenue in 2014, according to the marketing research company Kantar Media. The show drew an average of nearly three million viewers a night over the last month.

And its popularity among conservatives has made Mr. O’Reilly an influential force in Republican politics. Last month, he met privately with the former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush. (Mr. O’Reilly’s guest list is by no means limited to members of the right. President Obama sat down for two pre-Super Bowl interviews with him.)

Mr. O’Reilly is also one of the country’s best-selling authors. His memoir, "A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity," has sold more than a million copies, according to his Amazon profile. His "Killing" franchise — a series of narrative nonfiction books about the assassinations of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, with 12 million copies in print worldwide — is also enormously popular, despite drawing criticism for factual inaccuracies.

His first book, in 1998, was a crime novel, "Those Who Trespass," a violent and sexually explicit revenge fantasy about an unhinged broadcast journalist who covered the Falklands war. After experiencing a career setback while covering the conflict, the journalist murders the network executives and correspondents who have slighted him.

Mr. O’Reilly knows perfectly well what his audience wants: a justice-seeking vigilante, whether he’s the protagonist of a fictional thriller or sitting behind a news desk.

His popularity may not be built on his credibility as a news anchor, but Mr. O’Reilly’s audience is loyal, and the current flap seems unlikely to damage his reputation among his fans.

It could have the opposite effect. "The viewers of Fox are more apt to dismiss this as an unfair attack on their beloved anchor," said Mark Feldstein, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland.

On Monday night, when Mr. O’Reilly addressed the controversy on the air, his audience was more than 10 percent larger than the previous week.

Alexandra Alter contributed reporting.