Bill O’Reilly says he got into journalism because of the Washington Post, but the conservative commentator has no sympathy for the paper’s precipitous decline – and certainly not its recently exited fact-checker, whose excuse for an abandoned story about Joe Biden’s mental state the “No Spin News” host found laughable.
“I got into journalism because of Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate,” the former Fox News anchor said Monday. “I was just enthralled by that, and that’s why I got into being a reporter. Now, the Washington Post is a left-wing magazine, and it has lost an enormous amount of readership. And the stats are unbelievable.”
O’Reilly cited a 61% decline in subscriptions over the last four years, and the reason, he said, is “because they hate Trump.”
“And that was the subject of their fact-checker [Glenn Kessler] going on a podcast,” O’Reilly said, rolling a clip of Kessler’s recent interview on Mark Halperin’s “Next Up” podcast:
“There was a lot of effort to produce a story that would look very carefully at what seemed to be a cognitive decline,” Kessler said. “We couldn’t get enough people on the record. … I can’t get too deep into the weeds of what happened … but you weren’t in all the meetings. … There was a lot of effort to produce the story — it didn’t come together.”
O’Reilly was incredulous: “Embarrassing. Man won’t tell the truth. Everybody in the Washington Post newsroom, including him, knew that Biden was in decline and couldn’t run the country. Everybody. And he’s the fact checker! ‘Oh, we need sources about that. We need sources!’”
O’Reilly drew a direct line between “that kind of deceit” and the failings of the Post.
“You’re not going to make money throwing that kind of garbage, gibberish out there,” O’Reilly said. “Jeez. Just admit it. You hated Trump. The Post wanted the Democrat to win and didn’t care who the Democrat was. Just admit it. Maybe have some respect. … You can’t sell a product that’s that flawed.”
Watch the entire monologue in the video above.
