And so Brian Williams lied

Brian Williams' lies started shortly after the episode...

Did you know 'attention to detail' is a sign a person's lying - not the other way around? I'm stunned you would offer up excuses like this under these circumstances. Read on DJ - I have a theory...you're 'take' is starting to make sense...

All the 'vets' on the helicopters were telling the truth - and NONE of them 'misremembered'. It was only the journalist - Williams - who came up with the lie - not any of the vets.

On the other hand John Kerry - a vet was well known for telling lies about his experiences. He lied repeatedly... It's possible your friends were liberals... and therefore - liars.

Do you remember their politics?

The inevitable result of the 1844 introduction of the telegraph and the 1848 founding of the New York Associated Press (now simply the Associated Press) - the inevitable result of any and every wire service - is the decision of the journalists to go along and get along ideologically. “The wire” is a virtual meeting of all major journalism institutions...

I remember hearing something about UPI's bad choices allowing AP to become too strong - causing newspapers to be less 'diverse' - politically? Or maybe that was when AP started getting sloppy?

Anyhow, I've known ethical journalists... people in Theodore Roosevelt's arena - not everyone sells out.

“Anyhow, I’ve known ethical journalists... people in Theodore Roosevelt’s arena - not everyone sells out. “

Roosevelt marked the beginning of the ‘progressives’.

Communists came in and filled the ranks of the media.

I remember hearing something about UPI's bad choices allowing AP to become too strong - causing newspapers to be less 'diverse' - politically? Or maybe that was when AP started getting sloppy?

The AP was the first wire service, but even if there were several similarly important ones, they would still be peopled by journalists - and have the bias in favor of their own importance. So IMHO competition among wire services to do the same thing that the AP does would have similar ideological effect to the fact that there is competition within the AP or any other wire service. That is to say, bupkis.
Note that in the nature of any wire service, there is the planted axiom that journalists that your newspaper editor doesn’t even know is to be trusted implicitly. That is, that “all journalists are objective.” There is a gaping hole where the logic should be for that, because claiming any virtue tends to prove that you don’t have that virtue. For example, we have the word “sophistry” in reaction to the ancient Greek Sophists, which was a school of thought whose members claimed to be wise. The Philosophers arose in reaction to the sophistry of the Sophists - and they explicitly refused to claim to be wise but only to claim to love wisdom. If you claim to try to be objective, that’s perfectly legitimate - and laudable if you actually do try. But the trouble with claiming actually to be objective is that

it isn’t possible to know that you are objective, and

the only way to try to be objective is to start from the assumption that you actually might not be objective.

So it is naive to assume that a wire service journalist is objective.
There is also O’Sullivan’s First Law to consider . . .

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