He lied? Yes he lied. Wait a minute. Maybe Brian Williams simply embellished. Guys do that all the time. We all want to be heroes.
We enhance the truth particularly as we behaved in war.
That’s where Brian Williams met his disgrace. “That’s the way it is,” Walter Cronkite used to say. Well, no. Not quite, these days.
There too, in Israel, some are catching on to the deceptions from “news you can trust.” Leading journalist Kalman Liebeskind on Arutz Sheva upbraids (leftist) Big Media for their volley of lies and half-truths especially as they go gunning for Benjamin Netanyahu through torrents of abuse.
Onto our own Brian Williams, did his Army helicopter really come under enemy fire 2003 in Iraq? No. He’s come clean, partly. But he was there in Iraq. Did he really suffer terribly during his coverage of Katrina? Apparently not. But he was there in New Orleans during that terrible hurricane.
Get the point? To sell a lie successfully, it must be based on some truth. Moreover, he is no coward.
He simply ended up in the wrong job. The job as anchorman for NBC Nightly News was too restrictive for his wandering mind. He should have been a poet, a novelist. Lying or embellishment is a requirement, the job description. Hemingway was a bigger hero in his own prose than on the battlefield.
The Times is like all Liberals. If they don’t like the world as it is, they invent the world as it should be to their liking…and they print it as such.
As for William Faulkner, claims that he served in the military were never substantiated. He still won the Nobel Prize, as did Hemingway.
No harm in lying when you are in the right business, the business of making up stories – and so here is the rub.
When you give the news, there should be no tricky business. Give it straight and trust us to discern the good, the bad and the ugly.
That is not what we have been getting from our three major networks, CBS, ABC and NBC. Brian Williams is NBC but on most days they all sound the same. They sound like The New York Times. The Times is like all Liberals. If they don’t like the world as it is, they invent the world as it should be to their liking…and they print it as such.
The networks repeat the slant and add the moving pictures.
If the Times does not like the American military, and indeed it does not, it will publish a hundred stories about a single unpleasant incident at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, but ignore the noblest deeds of our men and women in Uniform. Same goes for our greatest ally, the nation of Israel.
The Times nurses a deep grudge against Israel, so it invents stories about the Jewish State, and here too, the most glorious acts performed by Israel go unpublished. The falsehoods remain in print and get repeated later that night for broadcast. That’s how generations are conditioned and how bigotries are born.
The Voice of dubious Authority speaks and so collectively we bow and declare, Long Live Big Brother.
Let’s hear nothing about Radical Islam but let’s hear it again about Global Warming.
Bernard Goldberg spent some 20 honorable years at CBS. He got fed up with the bias, quit and wrote a book named “BIAS.” Sharyl Attkisson also spent some 20 years at CBS. Then she too got fed up. Her stories, particularly those that revealed Obama in a bad light, kept getting stonewalled. So she quit and wrote a book called “Stonewalled.”
For everything you need to know about the news business but were afraid to ask, I suggest you read The Bathsheba Deadline for the drama of journalism from behind the scenes. This is the inside scoop from the experiences and point of view of a warrior journalist, Jay Garfield who kept warning about the diet we’ve been getting through Half the News That’s Fit to Print.
That makes us fully deceived.
Throughout the years, Brian Williams, which is to say NBC, CBS and ABC, and CNN – they did not only lie to us. They did worse. They dressed up an emperor who has no clothes. Instead of warning us, they fooled us. So we have a leader that we still know nothing about. The damage has been done and the price is terrible.
Deception is dangerous either way, but all along we’ve been getting maneuvered from the Left and from the tyranny of Big Brother as Anchorman.
It’s not about Brian Williams. It’s about being manipulated by the rest of them as well to the point where we can’t see straight.
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. The new thriller from the New York-based novelist, The Bathsheba Deadline, a heroic editor’s singlehanded war on terror and against media bias. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com