Revealed

Hat tip Instapundit

Hitler reacts to the loss of Brian Williams

Thanks to Christopher Buckley

Brian Williams being Brian

John Nolte has a list here of 32

proven lies, suspected lies, disputed by on-the-record eye witnesses, or contradicted by Williams himself.

Conflating memories

Manhattan Infidel has garnered another important exclusive interview with a figure in the news. This time it is Brian Williams, he of the conflated memories.

Corroding public trust

Charles Lipson writes,

Editors may have their own slant on which stories matter most. The left cares more about income inequality and cheating corporations; the right, more about high taxes, bad regulations, and government overreach. But whatever the stories, we expect them to be truthful.

...Brian Williams was shredding his job description when he made up false, first-person accounts of events and reported them as actual news. He should not be put on “temporary leave” and quietly eased out. He should be publicly fired for cause. The problem is not just that he harmed the “NBC brand,” though he surely did. The problem is that he violated a reporter’s basic responsibility to tell the truth. His mistake wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment one, which might be forgiven after a sincere apology. He repeated a deliberately false narrative multiple times and added newly-fabricated details as he went along. Williams’ transgression hurts all reputable news organizations because it corrodes public trust in reporting.

...When reporters forfeit their credibility by making up stories, sources, or quotes, we are right to mock them. When their violations are significant or repeated, they should be fired. That’s what happened to Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Stephen Glass at the New Republic. When the Washington Post discovered its reporter, Janet Cooke, had fabricated her most important story, she had to pick up her severance pay and return her Pulitzer Prize. Demanding honest reporting has nothing to do with the reporter's politics, personality, or personal life. It is about professional standards and our reasonable expectations. As viewers, readers, and democratic citizens, we must be able to distinguish between Walter Mitty and Walter Cronkite, between the Onion and the NBC Nightly News. It’s essential for our news organizations, and it matters for our democracy.

Read more here.

Is it too much to ask a newsman to tell the truth?

James Taranto weighs in on the Brian Williams story, saying

it isn’t too much to expect him to tell the truth.

What is the Williams story?

a self-serving lie motivated by a desire to burnish Williams’s own authority by associating himself with the military, an institution that actually does command widespread trust?

Read more here.

Which is worse?

Linda Stasi asks,

Is it worse for a news anchor to lie about being forced down by enemy fire in Iraq than it is for a perennial presidential candidate to lie about ducking sniper fire — with her young daughter, yet — in Bosnia?

Both are horrible, but it’s worse for Hillary Clinton, who expects to run the country, to lie about something like this than it is for a blow-dried TV anchor to lie.

The fact that Brian Williams and Clinton (inset with daughter) thought they’d get away with their outrageous war stories despite there being living, breathing witnesses, video and now social media, is bizarrely disturbing. The hubris of the famous in believing that they can get away with lying forever because they are above it all never fails to astound. And never fails to happen.

Interesting, too, is that Clinton said she misspoke and Williams said he misremembered.

If you can’t remember or are mistaken about something as gigantic as getting shot at, how in hell can you report the news, let alone run a country?

At the time, Clinton said, “So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation.”

Read more here.

I'd watch him!

This scoop discovered by the Astute Blogger

Brian Williams: a self-aggrandizing liar or a mentally ill fantasist?

Mark Steyn sometimes writes really long sentences:

Next to the Iranian nuclear program or Putin's neo-Soviet expansionism, the question of whether NBC News "managing editor" Brian Williams is a self-aggrandizing liar or a mentally ill fantasist is a relatively minor matter, notwithstanding that he is the very embodiment of the strange antiquated assumptions of network news - that because a chap looks like a 1950s department-store mannequin he's your go-to guy for economic analysis and foreign policy.

Read more here.

Credibility

Do national news anchors need to have credibility? I guess we'll soon find out. When Brian Williams was a guest on David Letterman's show he told Dave this:

“We were in some helicopters. What we didn’t know was, we were north of the invasion. We were the northernmost Americans in Iraq. We were going to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates so the Third Infantry could cross on them. Two of the four helicopters were hit, by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47.”

The only problem with that is it is not true. The crew members of the helicopter that was hit in Iraq say Williams was not on board, as Williams and the network have repeatedly claimed since 2003. David Zurawik reports:

The admission from Williams Wednesday that he lied about being in a Chinook helicopter that was hit by enemy fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is astonishing. And he only admitted the lie after being confronted with it by the military publication, "Stars and Stripes," which has a well-documented report and timeline showing his shifting version of events over the years.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.


...How could you expect anyone who served in the military to ever see this guy onscreen again and not feel contempt? How could you expect anyone to believe he or the broadcast he leads has any credibility?

Read more here.