Bill O'Reilly has declared himself vindicated by newly unearthed footage of a 1982 riot in Argentina, despite the archive tapes failing to support his disputed claims that he reported from a war zone massacre as a young correspondent.
The Fox News anchor showed excerpts of clips that had been released by CBS earlier on Monday at his request and claimed they backed up his descriptions of the peril he faced when reporting from the country at the end of the Falklands war.
"As I reported accurately, the violence was horrific," O'Reilly told viewers of the O'Reilly Factor on Monday night. "In my reporting I told it exactly the way it was".
O'Reilly has been accused by Mother Jones magazine of inflating his role in covering the Falklands war as a correspondent for CBS News. While O'Reilly has frequently claimed that he reported on the war from a "combat zone", he in fact remained in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian capital, which was 1,200 miles away from the conflict.
O'Reilly risked intensifying the controversy on Monday by threatening a female reporter who interviewed him about the dispute. According to the New York Times, he told its reporter Emily Steel that if he did not approve of her resulting article "I'm coming after you with everything I have," adding: "You can take it as a threat."
The 65-year-old anchor – who earlier dismissed the Mother Jones article as "total bullshit", "disgusting", "defamation" and "a piece of garbage" – had promised that the archive tapes would comprehensively disprove the charges against him.
Yet the four clips released by CBS did not back up O'Reilly's repeated claims in recent years that Argentinian forces had mown down protesters with live ammunition, and that O'Reilly himself had seen several demonstrators being shot and killed.
The narrator of a CBS special report broadcast on the night of 15 June 1982, correspondent Eric Engberg, said police at the protests had used guns "that shot teargas and plastic bullets" and that witnesses had reported "some serious injuries".
The following morning, Charles Gomez told CBS Morning News viewers that Argentinian forces had used "teargas guns and shotguns firing plastic bullets" in response to demonstrators "pelting officers with coins and garbage". Gomez noted that "an unknown number of demonstrators were injured".
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