Rory O’Connor writes:

Now it becomes clear that O’Reilly is a thief as well, who stole an exclusive investigative story broken in the pages of the recently launched free daily amNewYork, and presented it as his own. The front page exclusive, which concerned a charity fund organized to reopen Lady Liberty, ran on February 2. It revealed that although the fund raised $40 million annually, officials were using the money for minor maintenance instead of the $7 million in repairs necessary to reopen the monument to the public.

Two weeks later O’Reilly’s researcher, Susan Beachy, called amNewYork and asked for a copy of the article. Alex Storozynski, amNewYork editor, followed up with O’Reilly’s producer Rich McCue, who told him, “We know you guys broke this story. We haven’t seen it anywhere else.”

To Storozynski’s surprise, however, no mention was made of his newspaper when the story appeared on The O’Reilly Factor. Instead O’Reilly took credit for it himself. As Storozynski later wrote to O’Reilly, “Even the Daily News has given us credit when we break a story, and they are one of our competitors.”

Also check out the article for Rory’s first hand experience going on the O’Reilly show and being shit-canned at the last moment because he wouldn’t take an extreme position.