Bill O’Reilly’s military service fib
“I tell you what, I’ve been in combat. I’ve seen it. I’ve been close to it. And if my unit is in danger and I got a captured guy and the guy knows where the enemy is and I’m looking him in the eye, the guy better tell me. That’s all I’m gonna tell you. If it’s life or death, he’s going first.” — Bill O’Reilly, on his radio show.
The problem is, 
Bill O’Reilly never served in the military.
Photo: Bill O’Reilly, make-believe military veteran.
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Mother Jones nails Bill O’Reilly to the barn door on his ‘combat experience’ fabrications
Mother Jones, source of fearless journalism, says Bill O’Reilly has his own “Brian Williams problem” — and prints three articles about it. Why the overkill? Maybe because nobody likes sanctimonious, hypocritical, stone-casting liars:
“After NBC News suspended anchor Brian Williams for erroneously claiming that he was nearly shot down in a helicopter while covering the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly went on a tear. … He bemoaned the supposed culture of deception within the liberal media, and he proclaimed that the Williams controversy should prompt questioning of other ‘distortions’ by left-leaning outlets. Yet for years, O’Reilly has recounted dramatic stories about his own war reporting that don’t withstand scrutiny—even claiming he acted heroically in a war zone that he apparently never set foot in.
“O’Reilly has repeatedly told his audience that he was a war correspondent during the Falklands war and that he experienced combat during that 1982 conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina. … [But] American reporters were not on the ground in this distant war zone. ‘Nobody got to the war zone during the Falklands war,’ Susan Zirinsky, a longtime CBS News producer who helped manage the network’s coverage of the war from Buenos Aires, tells Mother Jones. She does not remember what O’Reilly did during his time in Argentina. But she notes that the military junta kept US reporters from reaching the islands: ‘You weren’t allowed on by the Argentinians. No CBS person got there.’ …”
That’s how Bob Schieffer, who was CBS News’ lead correspondent covering the Falklands war, recalls it: ‘Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands. I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.’ He notes that NBC News reporter Robin Lloyd was the only American network correspondent to reach the islands. ‘I remember because I got my butt scooped on that,’ Schieffer says. ‘He got out there and we were all trying to get there.’ (Lloyd tells Mother Jones that he managed to convince the Argentine military to let him visit Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands, but he spent only a day there—and this was weeks before the British forces arrived and the fighting began.)”
Note, O’Reilly was working for CBS at the time, so when Zirinskyand Schieffer say “nobody” from CBS got to the Falkland Islands, that includes O’Reilly — who was stuck in Argentina with the rest of the CBS news team. Mother Jones also points out that O’Reilly’s reporting of a riot that followed the Argentinian defeat differs in major ways from — and is much more melodramatic — than what other reporters who witnessed the event reported. In short, O’Reilly embellished his experiences. His recounting, in his recent writings, of his days as a young correspondent reporting on El Salvador’s civil war also has grown substantially from his original CBS filed reports.
O’Reilly answered the Mother Jones article on his Fox show by resorting to invective and name-calling. He called writer David Corn “a ‘liar,’ a ‘left-wing assassin,’ and a ‘despicable guttersnipe’ [and] said that I deserve ‘to be in the kill zone.’” Corn responded, “[H]e told Fox News’ media reporter, Howard Kurtz, ‘Nobody was on the Falklands and I never said I was on the island, ever.’ Yet our article included video of O’Reilly saying in 2013, ‘I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands ….’” That makes O’Reilly a double liar, denying his own words.
What O’Reilly and Fox News refused to do was talk to Corn or answer questions. Corn explains, “Mother Jones sent O’Reilly and Fox News a detailed list of questions at 8:30 am on Thursday. We asked for a response by 3:00 pm. We then called Dana Klinghoffer, a spokeswoman for the network, several times to make sure the questions were received and to determine if O’Reilly and Fox would respond. She never took the call or returned the message. Shortly before 3:00 pm, we sent an email containing the questions to Bill Shine, a top exec at Fox News, saying that if O’Reilly and Fox needed more time, we would try to accommodate them. He, too, never responded. At 5:26 p.m., we posted the article.”
One of Fox News’ slogans is, “We report, you decide.” But there’s not much to decide here. Mother Jones has O’Reilly and Fox dead to rights. If Fox wants the public to believe it has the same journalistic integrity as NBC News, it has no choice but to suspend O’Reilly for six months, the same punishment Brian Williams got for a far milder prevarication.
Video: Fox News hypocrisy in action
O’Reilly won’t resign; here’s why …
NBC suspended news anchor Brian Williams for 6 months for exaggerating his “combat” experience. Bill O’Reilly did exactly the same thing, but he won’t step down, nor will Fox discipline him. Why? Because NBC is a news network, while Fox is a propaganda organization. Truth and honesty matter in the news business, but not when you’re peddling a partisan agenda. That’s what makes NBC and Fox different.
CBS kicked O’Reilly out of Argentina
Far from being the combat-veteran hero who saved his cameraman that Fox News mouthpiece Bill O’Reilly portrays himself as when he was a young CBS correspondent covering the Falklands war, O’Reilly was ordered by his bosses to leave Argentina for insubordinate and disruptive behavior.
“The CBS bureau chief in Buenos Aires, Larry Doyle, an ex-Marine LRRP, was something of a legend among CBSers because of his personal courage and his knowledge about how to do your job without exposing yourself to undue danger. Early that night in Buenos Aires he assembled the camera crews in our hotel newsroom and instructed them to refrain from using the lights on their cameras while around crowds. Television lights attracted potentially violent people and also made the camera-person an easier target for demonstrators throwing rocks. …
“According to Doyle, O’Reilly returned to the hotel in a rage over the fact that his cameraman wouldn’t turn on the lights to photograph angry crowds. Doyle defended the cameraman and chewed out O’Reilly for violating his instructions on lights. When Doyle looked at the tape shot by O’Reilly’s cameraman he saw that … O’Reilly had ordered the cameraman to shoot — with his light on. …
“[T]he demonstrations … had been well covered by three or four camera crews …. All that footage was blended into the main story, narrated by Schieffer, who [was] the anchor on the scene. When Doyle informed O’Reilly that Schieffer would be doing the report … the reporter exploded. ‘I didn’t come down here to have my footage used by that old man,’ he shouted. Doyle was stunned. … This confrontation led the next day to O’Reilly being ordered out of Argentina by the CBS bosses. … ”
Kudos and hat tip to Daily Kos for this story (and to Democratic Underground for photo below). As for me, I don’t see how O’Reilly’s career can survive; Fox will have no journalistic credibility left if they don’t sack him.
Photo of Bill O’Reilly discussing strategy with Alan Pinkerton (l.), President Lincoln, and General McClernand (r.) at Antietam on Oct. 3, 1862.
More newsmen refute O’Reilly’s ‘combat’ claims
CBS staffers dispute Bill O’Reilly’s ‘war zone’ story
Bill O’Reilly’s account of a 1982 riot in Argentina is being sharply contradicted by seven other journalists who were his colleagues and were also there at the time.
The people all challenge O’Reilly’s depiction of Buenos Aires as a “war zone” and a “combat situation.” They also doubt his description of a CBS cameraman being injured in the chaos. “Nobody remembers this happening,” said Manny Alvarez, who was a cameraman for CBS News in Buenos Aires. Jim Forrest, who was a sound engineer for CBS there, said … “I was on that crew, and I don’t recall his version of events.”
The contradictions come several days after Mother Jones, a left-leaning magazine, first reported about the discrepancies in O’Reilly’s claims about his coverage of the Falklands War. O’Reilly was a young correspondent for CBS News at the time, assigned to cover the war from Buenos Aires, which was more than 1,000 miles from the offshore conflict zone.
In the years since, O’Reilly — now the biggest star on Fox News — has repeatedly referred to his experience in the “war zone.” In his 2001 book, “The No Spin Zone,” O’Reilly wrote, “I’ve reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands.” On his show “The O’Reilly Factor” in 2013, O’Reilly told a guest, “I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off, you know, but at the same time, I’m looking around and trying to do my job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was more important.”
Mother Jones challenged some of these claims. O’Reilly responded by accusing the magazine of trying to smear him to hurt Fox News, and said the report’s co-author, David Corn, is a liar and an “irresponsible guttersnipe.” Eric Engberg, a CBS correspondent who was also in Buenos Aires at the time, defended Corn in a Facebook post on Friday and said, “It was not a war zone or even close. It was an ‘expense account zone.’” Longtime NBC News correspondent George Lewis, who was also there at the time, agreed with Engberg, writing on Facebook, “Cushiest war I ever covered.”
Did O’Reilly’s photographer get “run down” and bloodied? CNN has interviewed seven people who were there for CBS, and none of them recall anyone from the network being injured. “If somebody got hurt, we all would have known,” Alvarez said. In a Friday interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, O’Reilly said the photographer’s last name was Moreno. Roberto Moreno was there for CBS. He now lives in Venezuela, and he declined to comment to CNN. But Mia Fabius, who was the office manager for the CBS Miami bureau at the time, has stayed in touch with Moreno for decades, and she said Moreno has never spoken about any injury in Argentina. Further, Fabius said no injury report was ever filed.
Engberg, Alvarez and Forrest spoke on the record about their recollections of the Argentina coverage. Four other people who were there for CBS spoke on condition of anonymity, some because they still work in the television industry and others because they don’t want to be publicly criticized by O’Reilly. All of the people said they’re unaware of any civilians being killed in the riot. In O’Reilly’s 2001 book, he said “many were killed.”
“There were certainly no dead people,” Forrest said. “Had there been dead people, they would have sent more camera crews.” Alvarez called the claims of deaths “outrageous, outrageous.” … CNN’s report from Buenos Aires at the time described “a squad of tear-gas-armed troops” and a crowd “hurling coins, rocks, and even bricks at both police and journalists,” but no deaths.
O’Reilly has repeatedly defended his claims, including on Fox News on Sunday morning. “I don’t know if he was there,” O’Reilly said, implying that Engberg may not have witnessed the riot. He called Engberg “Room Service Eric,” alleging he often stayed in his hotel during unfolding news events. … O’Reilly also cited a New York Times account of the riot that said “one policeman pulled a pistol, firing five shots over the heads of fleeing demonstrators.” This … does not confirm O’Reilly’s claim that people were killed that night.
Quoted from CNN at http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/22/media/cbs-staffers-oreilly-argentina/index.html
Comment: O’Reilly has offered no witnesses to support his tales, because there are none. He has no defense, so he’s trying to deflect attention from himself by attacking his accusers. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit from the CNN story is that “some spoke on condition of anonymity, some because they still work in the television industry and others because they don’t want to be publicly criticized by O’Reilly. It’s tough being called a “liar” and a “guttersnipe” by a man who is a liar and a guttersnipe, especially when he’s one of the country’s best-known TV personalities, and is powerful enough in the industry to ruin careers. But thankfully a number of journalists with integrity and courage are stepping forward and telling it like it is.
What O’Reilly did may not seem like a big deal, until you consider that NBC suspended Brian Williams for less, and military veterans have a phrase for O’Reilly’s game: “Stolen valor.” Real combat veterans, who earned that status the hard way, understandably have no patience for pretenders.
O’Reilly was draft age during the Vietnam War, but he didn’t go. He got multiple deferments. During my tour of duty in Vietnam, he was an exchange student having a good time in London. I’m okay with that; the war was a useless waste, and adding his name to The Wall would have accomplished nothing. All I’d say to him is, quit talking about your “war experience” or having seen “combat.” You know nothing of these things. You had your chance to participate in The Show, to be “in it,” to go “over there.” Over the generations, millions of us did, but you’re not one of us. So cut the crap talk.
Oh, and I have a suggestion for Fox News, too: Fire his lying ass.
Photo: Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is better at smirking than fibbing.
The Mother Jones story must be true, because O’Reilly keeps viciously attacking it
Fox host Bill O’Reilly can’t stop talking about last week’s Mother Jones article calling his purported Falklands “war zone experience” bogus. Mother Jones concluded O’Reilly, a young CBS correspondent at the time, was stuck in Argentina with the rest of the CBS crew, instead of being in the Falklands as he later claimed in his books and on air.
O’Reilly has responded to the expose with name-calling and angry rhetoric, but no factual rebuttal of MJ writer David Corn’s analysis of O’Reilly’s whereabouts and activities during the Falklands conflict.
Public figures like O’Reilly get a lot of flak, much of it preposterous, and typically ignore it. (How do you argue with a fact-deficient nutjob?) But Corn is no whackjob, he’s a seasoned journalist, and Mother Jones isn’t Mad Magazine, it’s a serious muckraking publication. O’Reilly has decided they can’t be ignored.
That’s because Corn’s article in MJ doesn’t fall apart; it holds up. It hasn’t been refuted; witnesses confirm it. It can’t be ignored because it has substance. And O’Reilly isn’t ignoring it; he’s acting like a dog trying to shake a cat off its back, which tells you he feels the cat’s claws digging in.* Corn and MJ have him dead to rights.
Now, when is Fox going to fire him?
(* I owned a cat like that once. All the dogs in our neighborhood were terrified of him. Once he got on a dog’s back, there wasn’t a damn thing the dog could do to get him off. Dogs quickly learned to give him a wide berth. Once, I saw him chase a German Shepherd down the street. The cat eventually got sick and died; no dog could kill him.)
Another O’Reilly Lie Exposed
The Fox News host has embellished his journalistic credentials his entire his career. From Media Matters:
“Bill O’Reilly has repeatedly claimed he personally ‘heard’ a shotgun blast that killed” George de Mohrenschildt, “a Russian emigre who befriended Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and testified before the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination,” and committed suicide at his daughter’s home in Florida. “At the time, O’Reilly was a reporter for Dallas’ WFAA-TV who regularly reported on stories related to the Kennedy assassination.”
Media Matters says, “O’Reilly has bizarrely inserted himself into de Mohrenschildt’s story, claiming in books and on Fox News that he was outside the house seeking to interview de Mohrenschiltd at the time of his death,” and contends “O’Reilly’s claim is implausible and contradicted by his former newsroom colleagues who denied the tale in interviews with Media Matters. A police report, contemporaneous reporting, and a congressional investigator who was probing Kennedy’s death further undermine O’Reilly’s story,” citing “new interviews with former O’Reilly colleagues who say he wasn’t in Florida on the day of de Mohrenschildt’s suicide and documents obtained by Media Matters.”
It’s pretty clear who’s lying. The journalism establishment is closing ranks against O’Reilly, who has responded to the fact-based and evidence-supported criticism of his claims with threats and personal attacks against his accusers. The question is, when is Fox going to let him go?
Photo: Bill O’Reilly, serial prevaricator.
O’Reilly lied about witnessing nuns being murdered in El Salvador, too
From Media Matters:
“Bill O’Reilly has claimed repeatedly that he witnessed the execution of nuns while reporting in 1981 on the civil war in El Salvador …. On December 2, 1980, four members of the Salvadoran national guard raped and shot ‘three American nuns and a layworker.’ … O’Reilly has spoken on several occasions about his time covering the Salvadoran civil war as a CBS correspondent in 1981, suggesting at least twice that he witnessed the murder of the churchwomen.
“On the September 27, 2005, edition of his talk-radio program The Radio Factor, O’Reilly said, ‘I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador.’ And on the December 14, 2012, edition of his Fox News show, O’Reilly spoke of telling his mother that ‘I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ …
“However, O’Reilly could not possibly have witnessed the murder of the churchwomen …. The former CBS correspondent only arrived in El Salvador in 1981 …. O’Reilly even admitted he had arrived in El Salvador ‘right after’ the killings during an interview on WVVH-TV’s American Dreams Show on September 26, 2009, … contradicting his other assertions that he’d witnessed them … ”
By now, it’s evident that Bill O’Reilly is a serial liar who habitually photoshops himself into historical events, I suppose to make himself look like an enterprising journalist who gets the scoop. If you, for whatever reason, choose to believe this crock then the next question you should ask yourself is, if he witnessed the nuns being murdered, as he claims, why didn’t he try to stop it?
The more immediately pertinent question, though, is why Fox News is still keeping him on their payroll despite his credibility unraveling.
O’Reilly: No end to his fabrications
FOXISM: O’Reilly
More trouble for Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, After his claim to have participated in combat during the Falkland War, it now appears that the Fox anchor talker also lied about about witnessing the execution of four nuns during El Salvador’s civil war in 1980.
“Fox News claims to be a real news organization. Bill O’Reilly promotes himself as the host of the ‘No Spin Zone,’ Fox News sits in the White House briefing room daily, Mr. O’Reilly even interviewed the President during halftime of the Super Bowl. Now that he’s been exposed as a serial fabricator, Fox News should hold him to the same journalistic standards that any news organization would or else admit that their network is a joke not journalism.”
In the grand tradition of yellow journalism, Fox PR department struck out at O’Reilly’s critics:
Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims leveled against him. This is nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates Mother Jones and Media Matters. Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. FOX News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.
Breaking: NBC Suspends Brian Williams for Six Months Without Pay
NBC News has announced that Brian Williams will be suspended as managing editor and anchor of “NBC Nightly News” for six months. NBC News president Deborah Turness says she, along with NBCU CEO Steve Burke and NBC News Group head Pat Fili told Williams of their decision earlier today.
“By his actions, Brian has jeopardized the trust millions of Americans place in NBC News. His actions are inexcusable and this suspension is severe and appropriate,” says Burke in a statement.
While the internal probe, which is ongoing, revealed what anyone who has been following this story for the last 7 days already knows: Williams misrepresented the truth on numerous occasions. “This was wrong and completely inappropriate for someone in Brian’s position,” Turness writes.
A 6-month suspension would return Williams to the air in mid-August, just as the 2016 presidential primaries are getting into high gear. Lester Holt will continue to fill in for Williams.
All,
We have decided today to suspend Brian Williams as Managing Editor and Anchor of NBC Nightly News for six months. The suspension will be without pay and is effective immediately. We let Brian know of our decision earlier today. Lester Holt will continue to substitute Anchor the NBC Nightly News.
Our review, which is being led by Richard Esposito working closely with NBCUniversal General Counsel Kim Harris, is ongoing, but I think it is important to take you through our thought process in coming to this decision.
While on Nightly News on Friday, January 30, 2015, Brian misrepresented events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003. It then became clear that on other occasions Brian had done the same while telling that story in other venues. This was wrong and completely inappropriate for someone in Brian’s position.
In addition, we have concerns about comments that occurred outside NBC News while Brian was talking about his experiences in the field.
As Managing Editor and Anchor of Nightly News, Brian has a responsibility to be truthful and to uphold the high standards of the news division at all times.
Steve Burke, Pat Fili and I came to this decision together. We felt it would have been wrong to disregard the good work Brian has done and the special relationship he has forged with our viewers over 22 years. Millions of Americans have turned to him every day, and he has been an important and well-respected part of our organization.
As I’m sure you understand, this was a very hard decision. Certainly there will be those who disagree. But we believe this suspension is the appropriate and proportionate action.
This has been a difficult time. But NBC News is bigger than this moment. You work so hard and dedicate yourselves each and every day to the important work of bringing trusted, credible news to our audience. Because of you, your loyalty, your dedication, NBC News is an organization we can – and should – all be proud of. We will get through this together.
Steve Burke asked me to share the following message.
“This has been a painful period for all concerned and we appreciate your patience while we gathered the available facts. By his actions, Brian has jeopardized the trust millions of Americans place in NBC News. His actions are inexcusable and this suspension is severe and appropriate. Brian’s life’s work is delivering the news. I know Brian loves his country, NBC News and his colleagues. He deserves a second chance and we are rooting for him. Brian has shared his deep remorse with me and he is committed to winning back everyone’s trust.”
Deborah
Anderson Cooper, for one, is not so sure Williams will be back:
Where did Brian Williams come from? What was his background–his version and the facts? Williams was but one of many Ken Dolls and the occasional Barbie reading teleprompters and waxing sage like, trust me in a somber baritone voice…
Williams version–please view and then see what is missing:
Early life
Personal life
Brian Williams Weds Jane Stoddard, TV Producer
Published: June 8, 1986
Jane Gillan Stoddard, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hudson G. Stoddard of New Canaan, Conn., was married yesterday to Brian Douglas Williams, a son of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon L. Williams of Middletown, N.J. The Rev. T. Guthrie Speers Jr. performed the ceremony at the First Presbyterian Church of New Canaan. [Williams from a well-off Irish Catholic family]
Mrs. Williams is a freelance television producer. She is a former executive producer of ”Panorama,” a public affairs program in Washington on WTTG-TV, where Mr. Williams was a news reporter. She graduated from the New Canaan Country School and Duke University. Her father is vice president of marketing for WNET/ Channel 13 in New York. Her mother, Patricia Stoddard, is director of administration in the executive office of the Champion International Corporation in Stamford, Conn.
Mr. Williams is a New Jersey correspondent for WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. He is a former Congressional liaison aide for the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington. He attended Catholic and George Washington Universities. [community college, 18 credits = 1 quarter] His father, who is retired, was executive vice president of the National Retail Merchants Association in New York.
“Brian Williams Weds Jane Stoddard, TV Producer”. New York Times. June 8, 1986. Retrieved October 26, 2012
Career timeline
- 1981: KOAM-TV
- 1982–86: WTTG-TV correspondent
- 1985: Panorama Host
- 1985–87: WCAU-TV New Jersey correspondent
- 1987–93: WCBS-TV Anchor of weekday noon and weekend night newscasts; reporter
- 1993–present: NBC News
- 1993–94, 1996–2004: correspondent
- 1993–99: NBC Nightly News weekend anchor
- 1994–96: White House correspondent
- 1996–04: MSNBC The News with Brian Williams anchor
- 2004–present: NBC Nightly News anchor
- 2011–13: Rock Center with Brian Williams host
How Brian Williams and NBC Made His Scandal Worse
The anchor and the network badly flubbed the first attempt at an explanation.
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich weighs in on the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week, the magazine asked him about a certain news anchor making news of his own.
Let’s talk about the Brian Williams scandal. You’ve been watching him close-up and from a distance for some time. What do you think happened here?
I know and like Brian Williams. He also has better comic chops than anyone who’s ever read the news on network television. But I don’t know him well enough to know what happened here. He owes his viewers a detailed explanation, not just a correction, retraction, or an apology — particularly one as disastrous as the paragraph he slipped into the middle of the Nightly News last week.
It was that bit of abject spin, with its all-too-artful use of the word conflate and its invocation of the “fog of memory,” that turned what might have been a one-off, one-week story about a squirm-inducing bit of braggadocio into an epic mess. Instead of taking responsibility for his own actions, he patted himself on the back by attributing his “mistake” to his own selfless “effort to honor and thank a veteran.”
A story that had been on the bottom of page B10 in the Times leapt to above-the-fold status on the front page overnight. As the press critic Jay Rosen has written, instead of adding more fog to what happened, Williams should have been out front re-reporting his own story, “interviewing the military veterans who can help him correct his faulty account” — as well as his own NBC News colleagues who were with him on that fateful helicopter ride — rather than leaving that responsibility to every other news outlet, blogger, and amateur sleuth in the nation.
Do you think NBC’s handling of it has been appropriate?
A better question might be: Could NBC’s behavior possibly have been more disastrous? Certainly Williams has few friends at the network. If he had, someone would have told him not to deliver that correction, and someone might also have said that it was a bad idea for him to then be photographed at a Rangers game with Tom Hanks, whose signature screen performances include playing a war hero in Saving Private Ryan and a fictional witness to historical events in Forrest Gump. It was almost a subliminal invitation for social media to go berserk with comic images placing Williams as a vainglorious interloper at key moments of history. The loosey-goosey wording of Williams’s self-proclaimed hiatus from the anchor chair was another public-relations fiasco.
Since then, the network’s executives have entered the witness protection program, as has Williams — the very opposite of the out-front response required. The vacuum they’ve created has been filled by everyone else. As a result their internal fact-finding effort — or investigation, or whatever they are calling it — will be suspect upon arrival.
Almost every scandal inevitably has a political dimension to it. What are the politics here?
In a weird way, the debate over Williams has picked up where the debate over American Sniper left off. The Iraq War remains a festering wound on the body politic. Many of the nastiest Williams critics, online anyway, have been on the right: They view him as Exhibit A of a lying left-wing mainstream media conspiracy and link his scandal to Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing tall tale of facing sniper fire in Bosnia. But neither in public nor private have I ever seen or heard Brian Williams express any partisan political opinion. And the NBC Nightly News, increasingly top heavy with weather stories (and it’s not alone in this), is too anodyne to have any discernible political agenda.
At the same time, liberals, including Jon Stewart, are making the case that Williams is being pilloried for an infraction that is trivial compared to the Bush Administration propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent WMD that the news media fed to the public to gin up the war in late 2002 and early 2003. This is completely correct. But it doesn’t let Williams off the hook. NBC News was one of the biggest offenders in that jingoistic parroting of Cheney doomsday scenarios of imminent mushroom clouds; not only did its anchors wear flag pins, but the NBC peacock was rebranded with Old Glory. Neither Williams nor any other prominent NBC News journalist questioned the rationale for the war at that time.
And unlike some other major news organizations that made the same mistakes, NBC News never offered a detail public accounting of how it was duped — a sharp contrast to the Times, which eventually owned up in detail to its failure and put reforms in place to try to prevent a recurrence. It doesn’t help Williams either that the NBC boss of that era, Bob Wright, has now come to his defense by saying that Williams should be cheered by the right because he “never comes back with negative stories” about the military. Since when is cheerleading about any subject, let alone war, a journalistic standard?
Why do you think the public has become so obsessed with the Williams story — or, really, have they? Is it just the media that is obsessed?
I don’t know how to measure how much of the noise is a media obsession and how much of it comes from the non-journalistic public. But I do think Dan Abrams has a good point when he says that if this had happened to the CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, “this never would have received anything like this sort of attention.” That’s because Pelley, unlike Williams, does not have the wider audience that comes with performing comic bits on SNL, 30 Rock, and every late-night talk show. Williams, it must be said, is hardly the first hard-news anchor to dabble in entertainment. The legendary template for all broadcast journalists, Edward R. Murrow, traded off his sober news show See It Now with the celebrity interviews of Person to Person. But Williams’s ubiquity in entertainment television likely has contributed to the public fascination with his story.
Is there any point to anchormen at all anymore? How about the Evening News?
Anchormen are, as everyone knows, another “legacy media” casualty in the digital age. The evening news still has an audience that, like that for print journalism, is dying off. Though NBC’s Nightly News is (at least for the moment) the most watched of the three evening newscasts, even it has fewer than 2.5 million viewers in the key demographic of 25 to 54.
Should Brian Williams be booted? Looking at it right now, would you predict he will be?
Brian Williams and NBC News owe the public a detailed, transparent, honest accounting of what went on before either of these questions can be answered fairly. Until that happens, it’s hard to imagine how he could do the job anyway as long as an anchor’s duties include parachuting into war zones and covering politicians and others who tell lies in public life.