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She laughed. “No, Inside Edition has never been the recipient of a Peabody Award.”

I decided to call Bill. He was nice enough to get right back to me.

“Yeah, Al, what can I do for you?”

“Well, first of all, Bill, congratulations on all your success.”

“Thanks. What’s up?”

“Okay. I saw you the other night on C-SPAN, and you said Inside Edition had won a couple of Peabodys.”

“That’s right. We won two.”

“Well, maybe you should check that out with the Peabody people. Because they don’t think you did.”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Then, “I’ll call you back.”

About ten minutes later, Bill was on the line.

“It was a Polk.”

“A Polk?” I asked.

“Yeah. Just as prestigious as the Peabody.”

“So, there are two most prestigious awards in journalism?”

Bill didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “Al, it’s a very prestigious award.”

“Fine,” I said. “But, Bill, don’t you think it’s little ironic that you got it wrong about a journalism award?”

“Okay, Al, go after me if you want,” and he hung up.

And, by the way, that Polk? Inside Edition won it over a year after O’Reilly left the show.

I thought Bill’s reaction was odd. He hadn’t said, “Omigod! How embarrassing! I can’t believe I’ve been saying that! Thank you so much, Al, for calling me. Now I won’t humiliate myself by making that mistake again. Thank you so much for calling me rather than taking it public.” Instead it was, “Go after me if you want.”

So, I did. I called Lloyd Grove at the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column. Lloyd ran with it on March 1, 2001, after checking Nexis. He also offered Bill the opportunity to respond, and quoted him saying, “Al Franken is on a jihad against me. So I got mixed up between a Peabody Award and a Polk Award, which is just as prestigious.”

Okay. So that was over. He got caught making a mistake, and was kind of a jerk about it. Fine.

Hang on.

A couple other papers picked up the Peabody story from the Post. Newsday ran a March 8 column by Robert Reno titled “Some Factors About O’Reilly Aren’t Factual.”

On March 13, O’Reilly introduced that night’s Personal Stories segment: “Attack Journalism.” “This is personal to me, because some writers are really violating every tenet of fairness in what they’re saying in print about your humble servant.”

His guest was Michael Wolff, the terrific media columnist for New York magazine. O’Reilly and Wolff began by discussing the definition of “attack journalism.” O’Reilly, it was clear, considered himself an expert on attack journalism, but not for the reason you might think.

March 13, 2001:

O’REILLY: If you lie about someone it goes right up on the Nexis, where everyone can read it. . . . I’ll give you an example. Guy says about me, couple weeks ago, O’Reilly said he won a Peabody Award. Never said it. You can’t find a transcript where I said it. You—there is no one on earth you could bring in that would say I said it. Robert Reno in Newsday, a columnist, writes in his column, calls me a liar, all right? And it’s totally fabricated. That’s attack journalism. It’s dishonest, it’s disgusting, and it hurts reputations.

WOLFF: It’s also incorrect journalism, if it’s wrong . . .

O’REILLY: It is wrong.

WOLFF: Okay, well, then the guy made a mistake.

O’REILLY: No, come on. He made a mistake that’s—lives forever in the Nexis. And did he write a column the next day saying he made a mistake?

WOLFF: Well, obviously, obviously, obviously he should—usually, I find, if someone’s made a mistake, if you ask them to correct it, they do correct it.

O’REILLY: No, not in this society anymore.

So that was the story I told the seven hundred booksellers at the BookExpo America luncheon. Bill O’Reilly “mistook” one Polk that the show won, after he left it, for two Peabodys that, as he put it, “we” won. But then, not two weeks after conceding his error both to me and to the Washington Post, he attacked a journalist for accurately describing what he had done. I’d found four separate incidents where he had claimed to have won Peabodys, three of