Well, looky here. It would appear NBC’s Soldier of Fiction has been fibbing about more than just being shot down in Iraq.
“When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams told Eisner, who suggested in the interview that Williams emerged from former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw’s shadow with his Katrina coverage.
“There were bodies in other parts (of the city), but there were no bodies in the Quarter,” Brobson Lutz, a former city health director for New Orleans, told USA TODAY, adding that the only body he retrieved from the neighborhood at the time was a restaurateur who died of a heart attack.
As you would expect, we have a team dedicated to gathering the facts to help us make sense of all that has transpired…
I wish NBC luck with this task; they clearly have very little experience with fact gathering, as opposed to their customary duties of copying and pasting White House press releases.
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15 Comments!
I fucking despise the media.
I have never been naive but the last decade has about destroyed any trust I have of ANYone.
( Besides US of course )
You all have NO IDEA how much you all mean to me.
The fictional character played by William Hurt in “Broadcast News” has come to reality. Networks need to understand the profound effect this will have on all viewers; if they want to survive.
They shouldn’t keep this guy but weirder things have happened in the pungent body politic. If they do keep him, it might hasten the eventual arrival at the truth our American experiment so desperately needs. NBC’s trusty Anchorman would become the touchstone of much that is wrong with legacy mass media today – trust.
Trust is what makes a group of people in close proximity to each other a community, and provides the foundation for a civil society. I pay “my fair share” of tax trusting that my fellow citizens are doing the same. Trust is what gives colored pieces of paper “moneyness”. Jim Grant, of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer fame, states this another way; “…It is the nature of gold that its valuation must forever be a mystery. It earns nothing. It pays no dividend. No conference call, no management to call up and complain to. What I do think is gold is simply the reciprocal of the world’s faith in the institution of managed currencies. It is one divided by T, where T stands for trust. And trust is a shrinking number and will continue to shrink…”
Trust is essential to compliance in a complex society. No trust, no compliance. The “most trusted voice” in network news has greatly contributed to the erosion of trust. He took his viewers trust for granted. NBC should put him out of our misery.
The thing to watch is whether NBC takes any kind of action or just tries to sweep it all under the rug.
Fawkes,
“Brian von Münchhausen” is inspired. Inspired, I say!
Y’know, since NBC’s quit doin’ honest news,
mebbe they ought’a think about a new format.
Unbelievable, the serial liar still rattling the narrative in the No-Big-Crap network….them toads have no shame!
^ mike f (3): I think Bri Bri may have crossed what I like to call the Weiner Threshold. The Prog Establishment will throw him under the bus faster than the Caliph of Collectivism can roll a blunt.
“We are in the truth business. We fireed Wiliams and we’ll fire every other liar just as quickly as we identify him or her.”
There you go, special team. No charge.
Agree that the “wiener threshold” may be breached but will it matter? He will live on as an example of the disdain NBC has for its viewers whether on TV or out to pasture. The damage is not so much what he just got caught at, but that in our society that behavior may be – or is becoming – the norm. Like the millions of people who now know Al Sharpton doesn’t pay his tax, why should they?
At the risk of repeating a prog refrain; It’s The Larger Issue. Bill Clinton very publicly elevated lying to a high political calling for his liberal ilk but only now has the broadcast media been caught in the maelstrom of misremembering. Clinton’s dishonesty was a watershed low for the office of president and for foundational American values of truth, honor, and moral turptitude. Brian Williams presents us with a new watershed event further eroding trust, truth and honor. And stealing valor like a resentful fat kid that couldn’t cut it in the Marines.
And moral turptitude, but what difference, at this point, does it make? Does it seem like we’re circling the drain any faster to y’all?
“Fake but accurate” has become the byline of most TV news.
Rather’s forged letter about Bush’s National Guard service comes to mind. He lost his job, but his fellow travelers rallied round and gave him an award.
In a lighter vein, but still a lie for self-aggrandizement is this attempt by a wannabe anchor to make it into the big time. She’d have done better to bed the producer.
The man on the street expects prominent people in the public eye, especially in public service, to be honorable and tell the truth. When these people find out they’ve been lied to and maybe used by most everyone who appears on the tube, they first become derisive, then hurt, then cynical as the lying disease spreads. The people shift from optimistic and patriotic to cynical and apathetic, taking on the attitude “What difference does it make now?”
A nation can fight an existential threat from the outside, uniting in common vision and effort to defeat it, but when sacred things like culture, morality, duty, and honor mean nothing anymore, then the “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land” cited by Lincoln will snap, no longer binding us together, and we will become tribes squabbling over the spoils that remain. The “better angels of our nature” will be no more.
If our ship of state doesn’t come about damn quick, this country of ours will be lost on the reef.
^You got that right, Dick. It’s the shift in thinking that is glacial in its pace till – all of a sudden – it becomes a tidal wave of mob thought, then action. Which is why the Founders were thoughtful enough to structure our government as they did.
Sure took a bunch of lawyers to ruin it.
Sondra. 1)
This is a great place that has been put together here. I would eventually like to meet some people on the porch in person. The insights, wit, and honesty that are present on the porch are so refreshing.
@1&13: Once the FCC gets it’s hands on the internet they’ll take a wrecking ball to The Porch.
I hear Brian also beat up Jesse Ventura in a bar.