***UPDATED June 6*** Fox News host Bill O'Reilly was forced to apologize to CNN after anchor Rick Sanchez slammed O'Reilly for claiming that CNN didn't cover the murder of Army recruiter William Long at all during the day, instead waiting until Anderson Cooper's late night show to give it coverage. O'Reilly issued his apology to the news network after saying some "snide and surly guy on CNN" (Sanchez) pointed out that they had covered the story far more extensively than O'Reilly implied. (Video clip courtesy of Media Matters)
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CNN's Rick Sanchez slammed Bill O'Reilly Friday afternoon for his claim that CNN didn't cover the murder of Army recruiter William Long until Anderson Cooper's featured the story on "AC360."
"CNN is supposed to be the news channel," O'Reilly said to Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp. "CNN says we don't do opinion, we do news. Only Anderson Cooper at 10:00 covered this story. Nobody else! All day long it wasn't news to cover an army recruiter gunned down in Arkansas?"
Sanchez then proceeded to play a "Daily Show"-like montage of clips of CNN anchors and reporters discussing the story all day.
"Let's see, that was Kyra Phillips, Tony Harris, Heidi Collins, Lou Dobbs, certainly you saw myself, you just saw David Mattingly there, Wolf Blitzer, we saw Kiran Chetry, we saw Erica Hill — that's nobody?" Sanchez asked.
"Let's add this up together now," Sanchez said. "We led with the story when it broke. We led with it again the next day. We analyzed the terrorism angle with experts and called former FBI agents to take us through it. And as a network, we covered the story umpteen times throughout the days, throughout all hours of those days. But Bill O'Reilly says he only saw it once. And since he only saw it once, well then that must be the truth. It doesn't matter what really happened. It doesn't matter what the record shows. All that matters is what Bill thinks he saw. We called Fox today, by the way. No response yet."
Sanchez ended with a comment on O'Reilly calling CNN the "news channel."
"O'Reilly did get one thing right," he said. "We here at CNN do say we're in the business of doing news. You know why? Because we are. And while we are far from perfect, we do check our facts before we say things. And if we get it wrong, we say so. And that is called reporting."
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