VIDEO: Bill O’Reilly reports on shoplifting at NorthPark Center in 1975

Screen capture and videos courtesy of the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection at SMU, via YouTube

Before No Spin News, before Bombshell, before The O’Reilly Factor, before Inside Edition, and before stints at ABC News and CBS News, Bill O’Reilly stuck his foot in the muck of Dallas.

O’Reilly was a WFAA reporter in the 1970s, and he even won a Dallas Press Club Award for excellence in investigative reporting.

Here is O’Reilly reporting on shoplifting with some startling 1975 statistics — supposedly one in 10 people was a shoplifter, and 70% of retail theft came from employees stealing — plus some Fox News-ish language, such as “the war on shoplifting.”

The footage is inside the bygone Titche’s, Titche-Goettinger Department Store, in NorthPark Center.

Want to see more vintage O’Reilly? Here he is interviewing a 14-year-old ventriloquist and Richardson High School student Jeff Dunham in 1976.

Here he is in a moral panic about drugs in Richardson grade schools, without providing any evidence of drugs in Richardson grade schools.

And here he is sitting on Santa’s lap.