Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

Hang on.
A couple other papers picked up the Peabody story from the Post. Newsday ran a
March 8 column by Robert Reno titled "Some Factors About O'Reilly Aren't Factual."
On March 13, O'Reilly introduced that night's Personal Stories segment: "Attack
Journalism." "This is personal to me, because some writers are really violating every tenet of
fairness in what they're saying in print about your humble servant."
His guest was Michael Wolff, the terrific media columnist for New York magazine.
O'Reilly and Wolff began by discussing the definition of "attack journalism." O'Reilly, it was
clear, consid ered himself an expert on attack journalism, but not for the reason you might
think.
March 13, 2001:
O'REILLY: If you lie about someone it goes right up on the Nexis, where everyone can
read it.... I'll give you an example. Guy says about me, couple weeks ago, O'Reilly
said he won a Peabody Award. Never said it. You can't find a transcript where I said
it. You-there is no one on earth you could bring in that would say I said it. Robert
Reno in Newsday, a columnist, writes in his column, calls me a liar, all right? And
it's totally fabricated. That's attack journalism. It's dishonest, it's disgusting, and it
hurts reputations.
WOLFF: It's also incorrect journalism, if it's, wrong ...
O'REILLY: It is wrong.
WOLFF: Okay, well, then the guy made a mistake.
O'REILLY: No, come on. He made a mistake that's—lives forever in the Nexis. And did he
write a column the next day saying he made a mistake?
WOLFF: Well, obviously, obviously, obviously he should—usually, I find, if someone's
made a mistake, if you ask them to correct it, they do correct it.
O'REILLY: No, not in this society anymore.
So that was the story I told the seven hundred booksellers at the BookExpo America luncheon.
Bill O'Reilly "mistook" one Polk that the show won, after he left it, for two Peabodys
that, as he put it, "we" won. But then, not two weeks after conceding his error both to me and
to the Washington Post, he attacked a journalist for accurately describing what he had done.