A 51-year-old man is in custody accused in the shooting death of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed late-term abortions and who found himself the focus of commentary by FNC’s Bill O’Reilly for the last several years.
Tiller was shot inside his church in Wichita at 10am this morning.
As recently as May 12, O’Reilly discussed Tiller and his support of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. “She supported Tiller the baby killer out there,” he said to a guest, adopting a name critics had been using for years. (During her confirmation hearing last month, Sebelius said that between 1994 and 2001 she’d received more than $12,000 in campaign contributions from Dr. Tiller, a fact reported on several other Fox News programs as well, but not on CNN or MSNBC.)
But O’Reilly’s stories on Dr. Tiller go back to at least 2006. The show first began looking into whether Tiller performed illegal abortions and covered up child rape cases. In November, 2006 O’Reilly reported Tiller had performed late-term abortions to alleviate the pregnant woman’s “temporary depression.” A few weeks later O’Reilly Factor producer Jesse Watters traveled to Wichita and confronted Tiller’s attorney Pedro Irigonegary. Waters would write later, “He happened to be outside just as our van pulled in… and we sprang out with the cameras rolling.”
During the confrontation Irigonegary told Waters, “What’s important in this issue is not whether Mr. O’Reilly thinks that he is an expert on depression or not. What’s important is what medical people and a woman going through a difficult process decided what’s her best interest. I don’t care what Mr. O’Reilly thinks.”
TVNewser has learned O’Reilly will give his first public comment on Dr. Tiller’s murder tomorrow night on his show.