Intrepid Reporter Bill O'Reilly Also Did Not Lie About LA Riots in 1992 (Yes He Did)
Now it is time for your daily edition of "This Totally Happened, Yes It DID SO," from the Bill O'Reilly files! For our journey today, we will jump into our hot tub time machine and travel to Los Angeles, 1992, where six days of civil unrest occurred after four LAPD officers were acquitted of charges that they had used excessive force while arresting Rodney King. Who should appear on the scene, but Truthful Intrepid Ace Reporter Newsman Bill O'Reilly, who covered the situation as the host of Inside Edition. By this point, Bill had already demonstrated his bravery bona fides by witnessing combat in the Falklands in 1982, the murder of nuns in El Salvador in 1980, and the suicide of JFK assassination figure George de Mohrenschildt in 1977, so he was clearly the right man for this dangerous job!
In a 2006 interview, O'Reilly said that at one point during the unrest, his crew was
on the corner of Normandy and Vermont, right in the middle of it. They were throwing bricks and stones at us. Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time.
That sounds very scary, plus concrete rain would hurt so much! What do the other reporters who were on the scene have to say about that, and also did the concrete rain hurt them? The Guardian found some and asked them:
Six people who covered the riots with O’Reilly in California for Inside Edition told the Guardian they did not recall an incident in which, as O’Reilly has claimed, “concrete was raining down on us” and “we were attacked by protesters.”
Rick Kirkham, who was the lead Inside Edition reporter on the scene at the time, told the Guardian this week, "Oh my God. That is a completely fictitious story. Nothing ever rained down on us.”
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Weird! Maybe the raining concrete addled their reporter-brains, and they are unable to remember the situation as well as Bill O'Reilly. So what actually went down, according to everyone else on the scene who was not Bill O'Reilly?
Two of the team said [a] man was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighbourhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”
Obviously these reporters are lying liars who lie, because can you imagine Bill O'Reilly rolling up to a low-income neighborhood during a period of civil unrest and behaving like a shithead? Oh, you can imagine that? Yeah, us too. So apparently, after O'Reilly jetted into a burned out neighborhood and started doing a little routine limo-maintenance, a local guy, who for some reason didn't want O'Reilly dissing him and his neighbors while they cleared up the smoking rubble of their homes, got into it with O'Reilly and ended up smashing one of their cameras with a brick. The crew's sound man told the Guardian, “It was one person with one rock. Nobody was hit.”
In response to questions about O'Reilly's hallucination of concrete rain and angry mobs, a Fox News spokesperson emailed the Guardian the exact same statement that Fox released yesterday in response to the murdered nuns story. Which is probably a cool strategy! Obviously if Fox just keeps emailing the same statement about how this "unproven accusation du jour" is a "calculated onslaught," it will all go away and we won't have any more editions of This Totally Happened, Yes It DID SO. Just kidding! See you tomorrow!
