Well why
wouldn’t
he think that? It’s not as if American propagandists don’t lie
all the time, and get away with it. And
the negative consequences are virtually always nonexistent. In fact, the liars’
careers are frequently
advanced by
their lying! And a guy like Williams, who lies for a living, parroting U.S.
propaganda, doesn’t even
think about it when he lies. It’s a
habit. What happened
this time was that
he told a
totally self-serving lie,
AND it was
possible for people to call him on it, thanks to the
Internet.
Williams falsely claimed that he was in a helicopter in Iraq
in 2003 that was hit by insurgent fire while in flight. In fact he’s been
telling increasingly embellished versions of that lie since 2003, to the frustration
of U.S. soldiers who knew he was lying but whose voices were like unheard cries
in the wilderness.
Until now. Things are different now, in the Age of the
Internet, especially with the advent of Facebook and Twitter and the massive
proliferation of blogs. The U.S. corporate
propaganda system no longer has a monopoly
in America on perceptions of reality.
For the first time, the propagandists can be effectively challenged. [1]
The soldiers who knew that Williams was lying were
especially galled since part of Williams’ shtick is acting as a cheerleader for
U.S. militarism and aggression, disguised as caring about “the troops.” The fact
that he puts on a show of “honoring our brave soldiers” (in the vernacular of
U.S. propaganda) while at the same time draping himself in the mantle of combat
(if only passively- that is, he got shot at, he bragged) rather sharply
revealed Williams’ utter cynicism and contempt for actual “warriors.”
And then, when Williams finally couldn’t get away with his
self-mythologizing War Story anymore, he followed it up by claiming that he somehow misremembered what happened.
Well! I would have thought that being in a helicopter hit by an RPG (rocket
propelled grenade, according to the Legend of Williams The Valiant’s personal
War on Terror) would make rather a strong impression and stick out in one’s
mind, and be hard to confuse with merely riding in a helicopter. If Williams’ mind really is so easily
fooled as to what’s real and what’s imagined, if his brain is that addled, I
wonder how qualified he is to be
a “journalist,” let alone one “worth”$50 million.
So Williams “apologized” for his “mistake.” (By “mistake” he
means he erroneously said something untrue, in all good faith, not that in his
arrogance he thought that he could get away with such a brazen, implicitly boastful
lie, and with repeating
it again and again. And lie is
obviously what it is, not an honest error.)
Let’s take a look at another recent lie by a major media
front person, the former Nixon gun moll and blond honeypot Diane “Pink Lips”
Sawyer, one of the Big Talking Heads on the ABC propaganda network. Last year,
while Israel was laying waste to the Gaza strip open air concentration camp for
the third time in six years, she pushed a picture of a destroyed home in our
faces and claimed it was an Israeli house destroyed by Hamas rocket fire. In
fact it was a Palestinian home (one of tens of thousands) wrecked by the
remorseless Israeli war on the Palestinian people and UN facilities in Gaza. Caught
in the lie, Sawyer also “apologized.” We are to believe that there was some
mixup, somehow, unexplained. Consequences
for Sawyer? A bit of egg on the face which was quickly wiped off.
ABC
and Diane Sawyer wanted you to believe that this scene of devastation
was in Israel, not Gaza. How implausible. What contempt for people's
intelligence that shows! And thus is reality inverted and the victimizer
made the victim, and vice versa.
Of course Sawyer's lie was a lie in the service of the U.S.
political and ideological system (which Israel has successfully colonized)
whereas Williams’ lie was mainly in the service of his own self-glorification- some
of which rubs off on NBC of course, which is why they tolerate that sort of
egomaniacal fibbing. They want their “star” to shine! Shine On Brightly, oh Brilliant
Brian!
Then there are entire campaigns of lies, like “Yellow Rain,”
the claim that bee feces Southeast Asia were Soviet chemical attacks on
villages. Or the fake “Pope Plot,” asserting that the Turkish fascist Grey
Wolves terrorist Agca, who shot and wounded John Paul II, was a Bulgarian-KGB
agent. Marvin Kalb, a Big Deal TV “journalist” at the time, assiduously
promoted this CIA disinformation campaign. (He went to his reward later, a
sinecure at Harvard, from which perch he can groom future propagandists and act
as a recruiting scout for the CIA, no doubt.) Or the article in the ragazine U.S. News and World Report some years
back titled “50,000 Marxist professors on U.S. College Campuses.” (Really?
50,000? You counted?) U.S. “News”
also once ran a photo of a sea buoy on a beach with a Boy Scout troop standing
around smiling. Emblazoned in large letters on the so-called buoy were the
initials U.S.S.R. U.S. “News” provided only a caption, explaining that the “buoy” was
a Soviet spy buoy that had washed ashore. I thought- how very nice of the Soviets to identify
their spy device so people would know exactly where it came from. Not very
professional, of course. And so helpful of them to write it in English.
Because in Russian, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is CCCP. As it was on all
their insignia and banners and so on.
One could compile a list of literally hundreds of thousands
of examples of U.S. media mendacity, large and small, especially in support of
U.S. crimes like mass exterminations by the death squad regimes the U.S. is so
fond of.
Currently the U.S. corporate propaganda system is quite
cynically distorting the situation in the Ukraine- and the causes of the
conflict there- to an extreme degree. [Search “Ukraine” on this webpage to find
examples of gross Western dishonesty on this issue. The search box should be near
the top of the page on the side, next to that small orange B.]
So given how lying is part and parcel of the daily work of
the American power establishment “journalist,” how easy it must be for a
habitual purveyor of lies like “Brian Williams” to slip on a banana peel. Damn that Internet!
This “Brian Williams” creature is a typical type that
succeeds in the hypercompetitive milieu of the U.S. corporate propaganda system’s
“news” sector. He’s utterly bland in
appearance, a clichéd version of an American “White Man,” ruthlessly ambitious
and without any ethical scruples to hamper him, and utterly shameless in
promoting whatever propaganda the system requires of him. (Even his name couldn’t be any more generic if it
was “John Doe.”)
On the other hand, genuine journalists have a hard time of
it in the so-called “journalism profession” in the U.S. Examples include I.F.
Stone, George Seldes, Gary Webb, Robert Parry, and others, who struggle to get
by (or ultimately don’t, in Webb’s case). And it’s no different in the “entertainment”
wing of the propaganda system, where MSNBC canceled its own top-rated show,
Phil Donahue’s, before the 2003 Iraq invasion because he wouldn’t toe the party
line and beat the war drum, or the case of Ed Asner, whose popular TV series
was given the axe because Asner had the temerity to condemn U.S. crimes in
Central America. And oh yes, there was that little thing called the “blacklist,”
that lasted about twenty years all told, the post-World War II purge in the entertainment
industry of those with suspect political attitudes. While a certain range of thought and opinion is
permitted within the U.S. propaganda system (and this range expands or contracts
depending on political conditions and challenges the U.S. oligarchy faces, same
as in China, say) there is definite enforcement of basic ideological tenets. No
one is allowed to say “U.S. imperialism,” for example. All must demonstrate fealty
to the Warren Commission fairy tale about the JFK hit. Add to that the demand
that one at least pretend to believe
that two planes caused three massive steel structures to suddenly
implode on September 11, 2001. And that a clique of rich elitists called “the
Founding Fathers” created a perfect democracy, not a tightly-controlled
oligarchy ruled by these slave-owners themselves. And that a two-party
dictatorship is a democracy. And much more.
As far as the “news business” goes, the worst rise to the
top of the propaganda system, always.
The article has a quote by, of all people, the one and only
Brian Williams himself! In 2007 he revealed his supercilious contempt for those
he works so assiduously to manipulate and dupe, the common people, namely those
who dare to criticize Brian Williams:
“You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a
modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field
of work, and now I’m up against a
guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in
the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency
apartment in two years.”
Love Me, Love My
Propaganda, is Williams’ demand. Oh Brian, FYI, I don’t wear a bathrobe, or pajamas, during the day, and I don’t
live in an efficiency apartment, or with my parents. And your “credentials”
consist of years of incessant misrepresentation of reality, regurgitation of
official propaganda and ideology, and omissions and lies, in the service of
global corporate hegemony and U.S. imperialist crimes against humanity. Not as
impressive as YOU like to tell yourself you are, (and that the sycophants
surrounding your ilk are required to jabber at you, reflecting your glory back
on yourself).
So behold “Brian Williams,” who because of his
super-white-bread name and mien, we’re supposed to identify with as an avatar
of Everyman.
By the way, Williams has a contract paying him $10 million a
year for five years. Now NBC is stuck with tainted goods. Serves them right. (No
wonder Brian has such contempt
for the rest of us! He makes so much more MONEY than us, he must be far far
BETTER than we are!)
A brief note on the history of NBC: Like the other two
original broadcast TV operations, ABC and CBS, it was founded by a Jewish mogul,
then later bought by RCA (a big military contractor) which in turn was bought
by General Electric (an even bigger military contractor), which owned it until
a few years ago, when it sold it to the crooked and abusive cable TV giant
Comcast. (MSNBC, the cable network, is part of NBC. It was originally a joint
operation of NBC and Microsoft.) Comcast changes the billing names on customers
who complain to “Asshole” and “Bitch.” It got some bad publicity for that and thus had to remove the miscreant
employees, but the fact that employees would do that speaks volumes about the corporate “culture”
(attitude and ideology) of Comcast, which is one of the most hated corporations
in America, according to surveys, in fact probably the most hated. But since I don’t even own a television, and would
never pay for the privilege of watching propaganda, I don’t actually give a
damn about Comcast myself.
Ah, a typical blogger-loser “rant”! I love rants, don’t you?
