{"id":565,"date":"2003-08-28T10:21:17","date_gmt":"2003-08-28T15:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/565.html"},"modified":"2003-08-28T10:21:17","modified_gmt":"2003-08-28T15:21:17","slug":"bill-oreillys-supposed-peabody-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bill-oreillys-supposed-peabody-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill O’Reilly’s supposed Peabody award"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw, via the fine folks at Tapped<\/a>, that an unsuspecting columnist for Portland’s Oregonian has drawn Bill O’Reilly’s wrath. In news that should surprise no one, O’Reilly’s complaints are unfounded and misplaced.<\/p>\n

Columnist Peter Ames Carlin’s column last week mentioned that O’Reilly has feuded with Al Franken over, among other things, O’Reilly’s false claim that his previous show, Inside Edition, won prestigious Peabody Awards.<\/p>\n

This week, the apparently thin-skinned O’Reilly called Carlin<\/a> and left a voice mail message for the columnist to complain.<\/p>\n

“For you to write in your column that I repeatedly said I won a Peabody Award is absolutely untrue, all right?” O’Reilly said in his message. “I know you would want to correct something like that.”<\/p>\n

It strikes me as a little odd that O’Reilly was so bothered by this that he’d call a local newspaper columnist for a mid-sized newspaper to complain personally, but strange people do strange things. Worse yet, O’Reilly didn’t even leave a return phone number with Carlin, and when Carlin called Fox News to follow-up directly, a network spokesperson said O’Reilly would not speak with Carlin.<\/p>\n

With this in mind, I thought I would take a moment to explain exactly what’s what regarding O’Reilly and his alleged Peabody Awards.
\n
\nBefore getting a show on Fox News, O’Reilly hosted a tabloid-TV program called Inside Edition. Like its tabloid brethren, it was highly sensationalistic and tended to focus on celebrity controversies. There’d be an occasional political segment, but only if it had some kind of shocking element.<\/p>\n

O’Reilly enjoyed some notoriety while hosting the program and parlayed its success into his own talk show on Fox News.<\/p>\n

Starting almost five years ago, O’Reilly was on FNC bragging about his award-winning, syndicated tabloid program.<\/p>\n

“I anchored a program called Inside Edition, which has won a Peabody Award for investigative reporting,” O’Reilly said on August 30, 1999.<\/p>\n

The Peabody<\/a> happens to be the most celebrated award in journalism. There is no higher honor for a reporter in print or broadcast news. Nevertheless, O’Reilly claimed that his show, Inside Edition, was a recipient of the award.<\/p>\n

In fact, he did so more than once. A year after this initial claim, O’Reilly was at it again, expanding on the original boast.<\/p>\n

“Well, all I’ve got to say to that is Inside Edition has won, I believe, two Peabody awards, the highest journalism award in the country,” O’Reilly said on his Fox News program on May 8, 2000.<\/p>\n

Two weeks later, when an antagonistic guest was needling O’Reilly for his tabloid past, O’Reilly relied on the supposed multiple Peabody awards to demonstrate his journalistic credentials.<\/p>\n

“We won Peabody Awards,” O’Reilly said. “A program that wins a Peabody Award, the highest award in journalism, and you’re going to denigrate it?”<\/p>\n

Surprise, surprise, O’Reilly was wrong — on several levels. Inside Edition never won a Peabody Award. The show did win a lesser prize, the Polk Award, which in and of itself is odd, considering the low quality of the program. Just as importantly, when Inside Edition won its Polk, O’Reilly had already left the program. His incessant claims that “we” won an award failed to mention that show was honored after his departure.<\/p>\n

With the revelation that O’Reilly had gotten all of the relevant details wrong, he backpedaled, said he never actually made the claim in the first place, and started a ridiculous parsing of the word “we.”<\/p>\n

On March 31, 2001, O’Reilly said on his Fox News show, “Guy says about me, couple of weeks ago, ‘O’Reilly said he won a Peabody Award.’ Never said it. You can’t find a transcript where I said it. There is no one on earth you could bring in that would say I said it.”<\/p>\n

How sad. Anyone who could check the transcripts could find multiple instances in which he made the Peabody boast. O’Reilly’s apparent defense is that he never claimed to have personally<\/i> won a Peabody, only insisting that his show<\/i> won the award. Therefore, he argues, his original (and repeated) claim was technically true, except the part about getting the name of the award wrong.<\/p>\n

For a guy who continues to bash Clinton for parsing the word “is,” O’Reilly’s defense is pretty pathetic.<\/p>\n

And now poor Bill is so sensitive about the whole thing that he’s calling newspaper columnists he doesn’t know to whine about seeing this in print.<\/p>\n

To his credit, Carlin seemed more amused about O’Reilly’s phone call than upset. But I’d be a little concerned if I were Carlin. I hear those Fox News types can be pretty litigious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw, via the fine folks at Tapped, that an unsuspecting columnist for Portland’s Oregonian has drawn Bill O’Reilly’s wrath. In news that should surprise no one, O’Reilly’s complaints are unfounded and misplaced. Columnist Peter Ames Carlin’s column last week mentioned that O’Reilly has feuded with Al Franken over, among other things, O’Reilly’s false claim […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}