Bill O’Reilly will be on with his Fox News colleague Howard Kurtz this morning on “MediaBuzz” following new revelations about his — and his former CBS News colleagues’ — coverage of the Falklands War in 1982.
In a 1,700-word Facebook post, former CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg laid out his own recollections of that coverage. “The reporters, as I remember, were O’Reilly, Chuck Gomez, Charles Krause, Bob Schieffer and myself,” Engberg writes, none of whom actually made it to the Islands but covered the story, including a disturbance, from Buenos Aires.
Engberg, who worked at CBS News from 1976-2003, claims O’Reilly, then 32 years old, was trying to make the coverage about himself.
I remember looking on a monitor at the long stand-up O’Reilly ordered his crew to shoot, which was never used on the air. He shot this description in the middle of a clearly angry, chanting crowd. As a reporter I wondered why he would think he needed video of himself standing in the middle of the crowd when his own crew and others had taken plenty of good crowd pictures that didn’t have O’Reilly standing in the middle of the frame blocking the action. You don’t shoot a long stand-up when you have plenty of good pictures of the event you are covering. What O’Reilly was doing was in the realm of local news. I didn’t know at the time that he had also violated the bureau chief’s order on use of lights, but I wondered why would any correspondent would imperil his colleagues by turning on lights during a riot.
Engberg also claims O’Reilly “exploded” when he found out Schieffer would narrate the main story from Buenos Aires that night. “I didn’t come down here to have my footage used by that old man,” Engberg says O’Reilly shouted. (Schieffer was all of 45 years old at the time.) Engberg says O’Reilly was then “ordered out of Argentina by the CBS bosses.”
An FNC spokesperson says “The O’Reilly Factor” has contacted CBS News and asked them to release the footage in question. “The O’Reilly Factor” also invited Engberg to appear on the program Monday, but he declined.