O'Reilly incorrectly claimed at a February 10, 2001 speech at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, that Inside Edition, a show he had previously anchored, had won a Peabody Award. After watching an airing of the speech a couple weeks later on C-SPAN, Franken performed a search on LexisNexis and found three previous occasions dating back to August 30, 1999 where O'Reilly had repeated the incorrect claim. On at least one occasion, O'Reilly used the first-person pronoun "we" and said the show won (plural) "Peabody Awards".[15][16] Franken called O'Reilly for a statement and O'Reilly admitted he had made an error, correcting himself and stating that the show had won a George Polk Award and not a Peabody.[17][18] Further research that Franken documented in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them reveals that the Polk award was given one year after O'Reilly's tenure at Inside Edition and for work O'Reilly had not been involved with.[17][19]
Franken called Lloyd Grove, a reporter for The Washington Post, who called O'Reilly and asked him about his statements. O'Reilly said, "So I got mixed up between a Peabody Award and a Polk Award". Grove published the story on March 1, 2001 in his column "The Reliable Source".[20]
Robert Reno of Newsday wrote an opinion piece that used this example to argue that O'Reilly cares more about self-aggrandizement than journalism. O'Reilly criticized Reno's article as an example of "attack journalism" and said that "you can't find a transcript where I said [I won a Peabody]". He has rejected the characterization that he was lying and maintained that he never said that he personally won any such award. Franken and other critics have pointed to O'Reilly's use of "we" to rebut O'Reilly's contention.
Color me confused, but wouldn't you think a journalist would understand the difference (or at least that there is one) between a Peabody and a Polk award, or between the numbers 0 and 1 and 2?
I have to admit, though, learning that a person shouldn't try to bring Middle Eastern food into a woman's shower, is the funniest thing ever to come out of a sexual harassment case.
