NBC Gives Their Star Propagandist Brian Williams the Heave-Ho (For Now)

When, after a week, the “controversy” over the NBC “news” anchor’s pathetic and juvenile false story about being in combat in Iraq in 2003 didn’t die down (he claimed to have flown in a helicopter hit by an insurgent rocket-propelled grenade), the NBC bosses decided to cut their losses and try and erect a moat around the damaged “credibility” of their propaganda operation. NBC has announced a six-month “suspension” of Williams, without pay.  This leaves Williams’ dangling in the wind for now. NBC wanted to separate itself from Williams’ in the public mind. [1]

 

After a week of public opprobrium heaped on Williams’ head by citizens, not by the commentariat, [2] which mainly concerned itself with the careerist insider-gossip question of whether Williams would “survive” (as if losing a plum job and key position in the establishment firmament is death), NBC’s poohbahs ultimately opted not to stand with Williams’ implausible excuse that he merely was confused by some oddly-recurring memory malfunction.  Deborah Turness, president of NBC News, intoned, “This was wrong and completely inappropriate for someone in Brian’s position … As managing editor and anchor of Nightly News, Brian has a responsibility to be truthful and to uphold the high standards [sic] of the news division at all times.” The Big Boss at NBC Universal, Steve Burke, unburdened himself of a tongue-lashing directed at Williams; “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.” [3]

Hell hath no fury like a boss who perceives his property is damaged by an employee.

You see, “credibility” is a very valuable “asset” of “news” operations, really the key asset on which their power to manipulate the masses rests- and in turn their commercial viability too.

In the week since Williams’ belated outing as a liar, he fell from 23rd to 835th on a list of the most “trusted” people in the country maintained by Celebrity DBI. Oh yeah, and the ratings of NBC’s Nightly News fell 27% in less than a week. I think that’s all the explanation one needs for NBC’s decision, and its timing. Pay a guy $10 million a year whose public image is plummeting straight down to the core of the earth? Not good business.

But if one wants to explain away Williams’ narcissistic and self-aggrandizing lying as the product of a temporary brain glitch, one has plenty more to excuse. Not just the fact that Williams told the Iraq War (fish) story repeatedly, in public, most recently on his “news”cast January 30, but his history of lying and self-promoting exaggerations and tall tales. Williams lied from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He had another close call in his own mind in 2007, when he claimed that while cheerleading for the 2006 Israeli ravaging of Lebanon he was in a helicopter when Hezbollah rockets flew underneath. [4] Williams even claimed he once “looked down the barrel of a .38” handgun as a teenager, when he says he was robbed in Red Hook, NJ. Conveniently he didn’t report the “robbery” to the police. Residents of the area in question don’t believe Williams story, saying the neighborhood is very safe.

Mark my words: the next act for Williams will be a show of “self-reflection” and “learning from this experience” and how “it’s up to me to regain people’s trust” and how awful he feels that he “let people down,” all in an attempt to claw his way back up to his privileged perch. It probably won’t work, but he’ll land in another cushy, if less exalted, position somewhere in the power structure. The Establishment looks after its own. [5]

An unethical society like America is prone to having con men, fabricators, fabulists, and sociopaths rise to prominence, wealth, and power. Williams is an insignificant example, and only became widely iced because things finally, after years, went awry for the hustler.

“Poor Widdle ME! It’s so unFAIR!” Brian Williams now gets to wallow in self-pity, the usual reaction of the narcissist when bad luck strikes. (Don’t be fooled by the play-acted public “apology” that contained more lies, about faulty memories and confusion. That was nothing but a desperate ploy to hang onto his TV anchor chair.)

1] Undoubtedly various clauses in Williams’ contract with NBC were invoked to suspend Williams AND suspend his salary. Notice the difference from when murderous cops are suspended due to public outrage- they’re invariably suspended with pay. U.S. police departments virtually always stand in iron solidarity with the sadists and killers in their ranks. Suspensions with pay is a tactic to wait for things to blow over.

2] Williams’ chronic self-puffing lies only caught up with him only after years of egotistical prevaricating, when the newspaper Stars and Stripes, a publication aimed at military personnel, interviewed eyewitness soldiers who had been griping on Facebook about Williams’ bullshit and ran a story, which spread knowledge of Williams’ sleaziness among the armed forces generally and from there to the larger public. For more details on Williams’ deception and the larger context of this scandale du jour, see “Why 50 MillionDollar NBC Liar Brian Williams Thought He Could Get Away With aSelf-Aggrandizing Bald-Faced Lie,” posted below.

Ironically, Williams is an assiduous promoter of U.S. militarism, which is camouflaged in U.S. propaganda as “supporting the troops.” What’s actually being supported, indeed powerfully promoted, is U.S. aggression and imperialist domination. In this, Williams was just doing his job. (Unlike Phil Donahue, who had the top-rated show on MSNBC, yet another arm of the NBC octopus, back in 2003 when his show was canceled because he refused to drink the Bush regime’s Kool-Aid and pound the war drum like everyone else in the establishment media. There’s your “free press” and “freedom of speech” and “diversity of viewpoints.” Now we’re seeing the same thing over Ukraine. But I digress.)

3] Steve Burke summoned Williams to Burke’s palatial Manhattan aerie (one of his homes) to inform him of his being cut from the propaganda roster. Burke is chief executive of NBC Universal, a giant media combine that owns many subsidiary corporations in the U.S. propaganda system in both the “news” and “entertainment” arms of that system, including NBC, in which is nestled another corporation, NBC News. NBC Universal itself is owned by yet another corporation, the giant and widely hated cable company Comcast. These corporations are like a series of Russian dolls nestled inside one another.

As for the “high standards” of NBC’s “news” division that its boss Turness indignantly huffed Williams had besmirched, like all U.S. TV operations, NBC has a history of participating in CIA disinformation campaigns quite willingly, as well as spreading FBI propaganda and various lies of “officials.” It also is dedicated to presenting a false picture of reality generally in order to indoctrinate and manipulate the American population. One could catalog thousands of obvious falsehoods purveyed by NBC (and the rest of U.S. corporate media) which conclusively prove the cynicism of Turness’ self-righteousness.

4] He fed this fantasy to a student interviewer at a Connecticut college in 2007. Was she a pretty coed he wanted to bed? There’s a question for investigating. Oddly, during 2006, when he described his Lebanese exploits on war the NBC News blog, he never mentioned this hair-raising close call. Hey, maybe the guy’s problem is he’s too MODEST! Do you suppose? [“NBC’s Brian Williams told varying versions of rocket fire in Israel-Hezbollah war,” Washington Post Style section, February 8th, 2015.

Williams’ stories get better with each retelling by him. The real tragedy in all this is now we’ll never get to hear the version of the Iraq helicopter war story where the pilot is wounded and unconscious and Brian seizes the controls, attacks and destroys the “terrorists” on the ground, and saves everybody.

 

5] No less a personage than Burke unmistakably signaled this ultimate outcome, by saying, even as he was excoriating Williams, this: “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.”

Turness too, in her statement, turned on a dime from a vituperative rebuke to soothing words promoting Williams: “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.” Apparently not permanently inexcusable.

Turness forgot to mention that which Brian Williams loves most: Himself. (I assume he capitalizes Himself in his mind.)

A fellow self-promoting media hustler, the British import Piers Morgan, ran defense for Williams: “We surely need to get a collective grip and gain some perspective on all this.” Morgan is another ethics-free, media mountebank who oversaw phone hacking in Britain for a rival newspaper to Murdoch’s rags. The man has a point. Williams already explained all this! As he said, “This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran” by fabricating a self-glorifying ersatz “heroic” narrative oh-so-subtly lionizing himself. Just lighten up, everybody!

Why 50 Million Dollar NBC Liar Brian Williams Thought He Could Get Away With a Self-Aggrandizing Bald-Faced Lie

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. 

1] And they don’t like it one little bit. See “The Petulant Entitlement Syndrome of Journalists,” [sic], the intercept, Jan. 28, 2015. 

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?

For the New York Times, Obituaries Are Perfect Places for Propaganda

I know that sounds far-fetched, but it’s true. This organ has a consistent habit of blatantly distorting reality in its obits to conform to its ideological predilections and political goals. 

There are examples of this every week. Here’s one from the Sunday paper of February 1st.

The obituary is for Reies Tijerina, whom the Times describes as a figure in “a radical Chicano property rights movement.” [1] 

The second paragraph says “He never achieved his goal of reclaiming – for Mexicans, Indians and descendants of the original Spanish settlers -  the millions of acres that changed hands when northern Mexico became the American Southwest in the mid-19^th century.”

That opaque description of the actual history is all you get. What exactly occurred “in the mid-19^th century” that caused “northern Mexico” to magically “become” “the American Southwest” and making “millions of acres” “change hands?” 

A little thing called the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, when the U.S. invaded Mexico, conquered it, and ripped off half of Mexico as the spoils of war. Not exactly a normal real estate transaction, as NYT propagandist Sam Roberts, or one of his invisible power-munchkin editors, has it.

How dishonest can people who call themselves “journalists” be? Is this really a “news” paper, or a propaganda platform?

It would be sort of like reading an obituary in a German publication and coming across a sentence saying “the Jewish population of Europe underwent a sharp decline in the mid-20^th century.”  True, sure, but SO misleading, evasive, and dishonest as to qualify for the word, “lie.”

I have come across numerous similar examples of blatant, mendacious political propaganda stuffed into NYT obits over the years. As I say, you can find examples during any week. And it’s not just in obits about political figures, although they’re the worst, as one would expect. I will present more as I have the time to do so.

[For political, sociological, and psychological analyses of this pathological planet, see my main blog at jasonzenith.blogspot.com.]

1] “Reies Tijerina, 88: Led Fight for ChicanoLand Rights,” Feb. 1, 2015, page 16, by career NYT hack Sam Roberts. [Posted on nyt.com Jan. 27th.]