CBS News has responded to Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's request and released the footage of its coverage of the conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina during the 1982 Falklands War.
O'Reilly has come under fire after Mother Jones called out the news host for allegedly misreporting his experiences covering the war. Mother Jones' David Corn and Daniel Schulman claimed that O'Reilly had said he was in "a combat situation" in Argentina, when actually, he was more than a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires.
Several former colleagues of O'Reilly have since come forward to also dispute his claims, but the Fox News host continues to stand his ground, calling Corn a "liar" and "despicable guttersnipe."
CBS News released four clips on Monday: the “CBS Evening News” and special report from June 15, 1982, and the “CBS Morning News” and “CBS Evening News” from June 16, 1982.
O'Reilly played pieces of the clips on his show Monday night and maintained that his reporting was correct.
“As I reported accurately, the violence was horrific,” he said. “In my reporting, I told it exactly the way it was.”
But in a response on Mother Jones, Corn and Schulman said Monday that the footage "doesn't support [O'Reilly's] claims."
"Rather than bolstering O'Reilly's description of the anti-government protest he says he covered as a 'combat situation,' the tape corroborates the accounts of other journalists who were there and who have described it as simply a chaotic, violent protest," they wrote.
One clip shows CBS News anchor Dan Rather reporting that "as word of the Argentine defeat leaked out in Buenos Aires, thousands of demonstrators began to gather outside the presidential palace.” In another, former CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg also described the scene: "With guns that fired tear gas and plastic bullets, police opened fire. It is not known how many were hurt. But witnesses reported at least some serious injuries."
More from Corn and Schulman at Mother Jones:
On his Monday night show, O'Reilly broadcast clips from the CBS video and maintained that the footage proved "I reported accurately the violence was horrific." But the issue has not been whether violence occurred at the demonstration. O'Reilly had previously claimed this protest -- triggered when Argentines angry at the ruling junta's surrender to the Brits in the 1982 war gathered near the presidential palace -- was a massacre, with Argentine troops gunning down civilians. O'Reilly has relied on that description to support his claim that he was in a "war zone ... in the Falklands." The video does not show civilians being mowed down.