Is The MSM Imploding?

[Hatha Sunahara]

Brian Williams was suspended for six months without pat today. For telling a story about being on a helicopter in Iraq in 2003 that was hit by a RPG. Turns out the story wasn't true. There have been more questions about what Brian Williams has claimed as the NBC news Anchor. He said he saw dead bodies in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and al;so said he saw gang activity there. Turns out that wasn't true either. His latest 'factual misrepresentation' about being on the helicopter in Iraq was made on Jan 30th. It took NBC news almost two weeks to take him off the air without pay for six months. That's a pretty heavy punishment. Also, NBC's chief medical correspondent, Nancy Snyderman hasn't been seen on the air since November. She apparently ran afoul of the 'party line' about ebola, and didn't take the 21 day quarantine seriously enough by leaving her house during that period.

Is NBC worried that their audiences for the nightly news are catching on to the way they misrepresent the news? Are they worried that people will find out that ALL OF IT IS LIES? Since 1985, their audience has shrunk by about half. I would presume that the 25 million people who no longer watch NBC news get their news elsewhere--probably mostly from alternative media sites on the internet. I am just wondering if the the first reduction by a half took 30 years, how long will it take for the next reduction by half? Could people be abandoning the MSM at an exponential decay curve rate? Will NBC make it through 2015 with half the audience they started the year with?

I recently read a blog post by a media critic named Miles Mathis--here:

http://mileswmathis.com/guru.pdf

I find this guy to be the kind of skeptic I fancy myself as. You can get a flavor for his work here:

http://mileswmathis.com/updates.html

Seems that he thinks all the news is fake, and nobody in the news is genuine. I'm gonna take some lessons from this dude.


Hatha

[Glass]

but your a smart Hatha, you should be across all this stuff.

is cnbc the same as nbc? Is that the Jim sniff sniff Kramer network?

I don't think 6 months is much of a punishment. Sacking is more appropriate. Here's a cardboard box and a Pink Slip. Termination. Escort from the building. As the Japanese say, get lost loser.

Personally I just think he was taking a lead from the network bosses who I'm sure all were survivors of "something or other".

[woodman]

How is it possible that his bosses did not know about this as it was happening? They had to be in on it, so where is their punishment. Personally, I don't care a lick about any of them, I just think it curious that they treat Brian Williams as if he was completely in charge of this chicanery. We all know that the MSM is complete garbage. Even the news that is true is manufactured because the events are manufactured.

[Glass]

yes that's a good point.

I have thought that sometimes the crimes are so big that you really should apply the same punishment as you do to people. For such grievous crimes, shut it down. You would lock up a person indefinitely or terminate them permanently. I think companies should be halted from trading. For them, no broadcasting for 6 months.

Did the guy write a book? Did he say it in the book?

[palani]

Talking heads who exhibit the same standards of conduct as the VP? When standards of excellence are set this low why try to exceed them?

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/17/us/biden-was-accused-of-plagiarism-in-law-school.html

¶ According to the people familiar with the record of the 44-year-old Senator from Delaware, he was called before the disciplinary body at the law school during his first year because of charges that he had committed plagiarism on a paper. Mr. Biden entered the school in 1965 and graduated in 1968.

¶ CBS News tonight quoted an aide to Mr. Biden as saying he had been exonerated. However, an academic official said Mr. Biden had been found guilty, ''threw himself on the mercy of the board'' and promised not to repeat the offense. This, according to the official, persuaded the board to drop the matter and allow Mr. Biden to remain in law school. Mr. Biden's office declined to clarify the circumstances surrounding the case, saying the Senator had insisted on handling the matter himself at the news conference.

¶

[Hatha Sunahara]

I think Brian Williams has a Baron von Munchausen complex. He's a good, persuasive storyteller, but his need for personal 'glory' has gotten in the way of his job. His job is to keep his audiences in the thrall of the matrix--to keep them believing what TPTB want them believing. There is a method to their madness. They have specialists who prepare the script that is delivered on the nightly news. That script keeps the masses in thrall. Anyone who deviates from that script creates the risk that the masses will see through the illusion being created. SOme of them might just start thinking for themselves, and that is unacceptable toTPTB. So, when one talking head deviates from the script, they are on dangerous ground, and they have to take it seriously. What they are doing is too important to allow some Munchhousen to screw it all up by telling some fantastic tales that are easily identified as fiction. Thw news after all has to have the perception that it is real--that is, non-fiction.


Hatha

[Publico]

An old video of Brian Williams:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ucJN8cRDqM

[mick silver]

http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?81942-NBC-News-Brian-Williams-admits-he-wasn-t-on-aircraft-in-Iraq

[Santa]

Hatha, thanks so much for introducing me to http://mileswmathis.com/updates.html

I love the way this guy thinks. Really spectacular.

[Hatha Sunahara]

http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?81942-NBC-News-Brian-Williams-admits-he-wasn-t-on-aircraft-in-Iraq

My apologies, Mick--I should have done a search on Brian Williams before I started this thread--I'll post my further stuff on that thread.

Hatha

[jack1878]

The Mayor of Paris intends to sue Fox News for its false reporting that no-go zones existed in the city because of Muslim extremism. The entire story was a blatant lie.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/12/paris-lawsuit-fox-news-reporting-no-go-zones-non-muslims

[mick silver]

it don't matter hatha I was just adding what I have seen ...
My apologies, Mick--I should have done a search on Brian Williams before I started this thread--I'll post my further stuff on that thread.

Hatha

[Hatha Sunahara]

Here's more Brian Williams BS on seal team 6:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNJd54lJ-f0


Hatha

[mick silver]

Brian Williams' SEAL Team 6 stories are the latest to come under fire http://news.yahoo.com/brian-williams--seal-team-6-stories-are-the-latest-to-come-under-fire-210753237.html Brian Williams may have been suspended without pay from the “NBC Nightly News,” but the fallout from the anchor’s admitted factual inaccuracies doesn’t end there.
In the week since Williams confessed to propagating an inaccurate story about his experience covering the Iraq war in 2003, the once-venerated reporter’s every word seems to have been placed under a microscope, whether it’s his contributions to NBC’s Peabody Award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina (http://news.yahoo.com/brian-williams-unreliable-souces-151412943.html) or an anecdote about getting robbed at gunpoint (http://www.app.com/story/news/2015/02/09/brian-williams-lying-red-bank-robbery/23144639/%20) while working as a teenage Christmas tree salesman.
NBC may be investigating Williams’ reporting, but skeptics in the media aren’t waiting around for the results of that fact-finding mission to do a little digging of their own. Most recently, the reporter’s purported relationship with the elusive Navy SEAL Team 6 came under scrutiny.
The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/12/brian-williams-seal-team-6_n_6663570.html?1423753357) was the first to question statements Williams had made following the 2011 SEAL Team 6 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, suggesting he’d once been embedded with the elite team.
“We have some idea which of our special operations teams carried this out,” Williams told David Letterman on “The Late Show” the night after bin Laden was killed. “It happens to be a team I flew into Baghdad with, on the condition that I would never speak of what I saw on the aircraft, what aircraft we were on, what we were carrying, or who we were after.”
Williams mentioned SEAL Team 6 again on the “Nightly News” the following night. “I happen to have the great honor of flying into Baghdad with them at the start of the war,” he said.
Williams went on to elaborate further on his experience with the special team in later Letterman appearances and claimed — on the “Late Show” and in other interviews — to have received gifts from the SEALS over the years since their flight into Baghdad, including a piece of Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into the courtyard of bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout.
After digging through the LexisNexis archives of NBC transcripts, the Huffington Post acknowledged that Williams’ apparent failure to mention his trip with SEAL Team 6 before 2011 could certainly be explained by the secrecy to which he said he was sworn, as the team was not known to the public until after the bin Laden raid. After unsuccessfully attempting to confirm neither the flight nor the gifts with NBC News, the Huffington Post turned to former Navy SEALS for insight on whether Williams’ stories are realistic.
“My initial reaction is it sounds completely preposterous. There is a healthy dislike towards embedded journalists within the SEAL community” former SEAL sniper Brandon Webb told the Huffington Post. “I can’t even remember an embed with a SEAL unit. And especially a SEAL Team Six? Those guys don’t take journalists with them on missions.”
A U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman verified Webb’s comments, saying “We do not embed journalists with [SEAL Team 6] or any other unit that conducts counterterrorism missions.”
To be fair, Williams didn’t say he was necessarily “embedded” with the team, just that he flew to Baghdad with them. But SEALs who talked to CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen (http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/13/opinion/bergen-brian-williams-seal-team-six/%20)suggest there's little likelihood that Williams and SEAL Team 6 could have just happened to be on the same flight.
“That early in the conflict, there were only missions taking place, not bouncing between outstations,” a SEAL officer told Bergen.
Then what about the gifts? The same SEAL officer is dubious, especially about the bit of blown-up helicopter because “there’s no connection between the guys that went in early [2003] and the guys at A-bad,” referring to Abbottabad, the Pakistani city where bin Laden was killed.
It’s curious, Bergen writes, that a different group of SEALs from the ones he says he met would feel compelled to share with him a souvenir from their historic mission. But even if they did, the fast-paced mission didn’t seem to allow much time for anything off script, with the addition of blowing up the stealth helicopter that had crashed at the bin Laden compound to destroy its radar-evading technology before leaving the scene.
“If Williams’ story is true,” Bergen writes, “then during all this intense drama one of the SEALs took the time to pick up a piece of the damaged helicopter fuselage that he would later send to his favorite news anchor.”
CNN also requested comment from NBC on the SEALs stories, but was told that the network will refrain from discussing anything Williams-related until its investigation is complete. In the meantime, the independent media investigation pushes on, digging deeper in the archives of Williams’ life. Up next on the chopping block (http://www.mediaite.com/tv/brian-williams-may-have-fibbed-about-meeting-the-pope-watching-berlin-wall-come-down/%20): stories about meeting Pope John Paul II in 1979 and watching the Berlin Wall fall in person.


Brian Williams

Click to view comments 
View Comments (1778)

[mick silver]

Brian Williams Reporting Now Questioned on Berlin Wall, Navy SEALs http://sports.yahoo.com/news/brian-williams-reporting-now-questioned-berlin-wall-navy-183415610.html

[Hatha Sunahara]

The real Baron von Munchhausen is the security/intelligence agencies of the US government. Brian Williams works in the privately owned Ministry of propaganda. His job is to read the scripted Munchhausen tales on national TV. It appears to have caused him difficulties in discerning what is real and what is fiction. When your job is to convince the world that lies are truth, and vice versa, it might get hard to tell the difference. If that happens, you are useless to the Munchhausens in power. Paid liars have to present the illusion of integrity to be believed.


Hatha