Posted on 02/08/2015 10:37:52 AM PST by John Semmens
NBC’S Brian Williams finally admitted that after 12 years of bragging about how he faced death while reporting on the Iraq War in 2003 that he had lied. Real soldiers flying in the helicopter transporting Williams to the war zone unanimously attested that, contrary to Williams’ heroic story, the aircraft was not hit and landed safely.
Williams characterized his lie as “a mistake made in good faith. It was my way of bonding with the men and women who risked their lives in the battle against Saddam Hussein. It was also an attempt to make the war seem more real to my TV audience. If someone as important as a major network figure like me could come so close to dying for the sake of reporting the news, well, wouldn’t that make the news more credible?”
The unveiling of this long-running falsehood has had mixed results among media luminaries. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather counseled that “we ought not to be too hard on Brian. His story might have been fake, but was it really so inaccurate? Thousands of helicopter sorties came under fire in Iraq. Couldn’t his fib have served the more important purpose of showing how Bush’s war could’ve cost the life of an eminent journalist?”
Williams’ contention that what he said “was no worse than President Obama’s promise that those who liked their health plans could keep them under the Affordable Care Act. He misled tens of millions of voters and was rewarded with reelection. All I did was puff up my resume a little bit in front of the camera.”
Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw dismissed Williams’ analogy to what President Obama did as “unworthy of our profession. We can’t use the chronic dishonesty of politicians as our standard for what is allowed to come out of our mouths when we’re on the air.”
if you missed any of this week's other semi-news/semi-satire posts you can find them at...
http://azconservative.org/2015/02/07/congressman-says-media-not-pushing-amnesty-hard-enough/
Heh! Love the last paragraph there. :)
If they censored or corrected all the lies in the copy they read, you’d just get a test pattern when you tuned in. BTW, I regret your parenthetical disclaimer you’ve added to your posts. I always got a good-hearted groan when I’d fall for something , then look back and see you were the poster.
“unworthy of our profession”.
++++
BROKAW: “Last month we reported on Forest Service employees in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest who felt the forest was overcut, causing fouled streams and endangering fish. At one brief point, we inadvertently used footage of dead fish from another forest farther south, not from Clearwater. We also showed workers conducting tests on water in the Clearwater where fish appeared to be dead. In fact, they were not; they had been stunned for testing purposes. And finally, we showed a large area of land that the timber industry claims was burned and not cut. Our information remains that the video accurately portrayed the clearcuts, although some portions may have been cut after a fire. We regret the inappropriate video to illustrate that was otherwise an accurate report.”
I don't think that was voluntary, or John's idea. I seem to recall that the Mods required it, after complaints from other FReepers that they were being taken in or fooled by the satire, and got cranky about it. Unlike you (and I), they didn't enjoy or appreciate the humor of the situation.
Sorta like the idiots on Facebook who demanded the same thing of The Onion satire/news postings -- too many gullible people were getting all stirred up because they read something in The Onion and didn't realize it was wildly improbable or impossible, and parroted it along like real data.
P.T. Barnum was right.
John: another great article. Keep 'em coming, disclaimered or not!!
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