Bill O’Reilly and Fox News Redouble Defense of His Falklands Reporting

The Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Monday stepped up his defense against reports that he embellished stories about his war reporting earlier in his career, while some former colleagues continued to say he had exaggerated his experiences.

Mr. O’Reilly is contesting an article in the magazine Mother Jones and subsequent interviews with former journalists at CBS News that accuse him of misrepresenting his coverage of the Falklands war in 1982 as a young correspondent for CBS News.

The central dispute is whether Mr. O’Reilly reported from active war zones, as he has repeatedly said on the air and in his 2001 book, “The No Spin Zone: Confrontations With the Powerful and Famous in America.”

Mr. O’Reilly has said that he had never claimed he 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, some 1,200 miles from the Falklands.

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