Evidence is starting to pile up that Bill O'Reilly embellished his "war reporting" chops.
Left-leaning magazine Mother Jones documented Thursday a number of alleged inaccuracies in the Fox News host's accounts of covering the Falklands War. Over the weekend, a former colleague of O'Reilly's, retired CBS correspondent Eric Engberg, backed up Mother Jones' report, saying O'Reilly had fabricated and exaggerated portions of his story.
Now, yet another former colleague has come forward in an interview with progressive watchdog group Media Matters, calling O'Reilly's tales "absurd" and claiming that the then-correspondent did not play "any significant role" in CBS News' coverage of the war.
"I don't recall him doing any major story that anybody remembers and he was there a very short time. Then he was recalled, I don't know why," former CBS News correspondent Charles Krause said. "He wasn't a team player and people thought he was grandstanding, basically."
O'Reilly claims to have "reported on the ground in active war zones" and "survived a combat situation" during the Falklands War, an armed conflict between Argentina and the U.K. over control of the Falkland Islands. The U.S. press was not allowed on the islands, but O'Reilly asserts that the unrest in Buenos Aires following Argentina's surrender constituted "combat."
Krause -- who worked at CBS News from 1980 to 1983, and claims to have been in Argentina at the same time as O'Reilly in '82 -- rejected the idea that the riots taking place some 1,200 miles from the Falklands in Buenos Aires met such a standard.
"That's absurd because Buenos Aires was Buenos Aires," Krause said, adding that people might have been demonstrating or "scuffling," rather than rioting. "It was just like it always was; there was very little evidence of the war in Buenos Aires. The war was being fought thousands of miles away."
Krause also said he doesn't remember a cameraman being injured during their reporting, while O'Reilly claims he dragged a man "bleeding from the ear" to safety. According to Krause, the CBS News crew largely stayed out of harm's way.
"The only danger that we were in was we were staying at the Sheraton Hotel, which was this massive, modern tower overlooking the city," he said. "We were in no danger whatsoever."