Patterico's Pontifications

2/6/2015

Where Is Media Watchdog Group On The Brian Williams Story?

Filed under: General — Dana @ 5:11 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

So, I guess the absence of any reporting by Media Matters on the Brian Williams debacle confirms what we have all suspected known to be true: NBC is a liberal news media outlet.

Thank you for the confirmation, MM.

–Dana

The Media’s Amazing Disinterest in Brian Williams’s (And Hillary Clinton’s) Lies

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:54 am



As the controversy over Brian Williams continues, one of the things I find interesting (but not surprising) is how disinterested Big Media was in the possibility that Brian Williams might have been lying:

Mr. Summerlin said that Mr. Williams’s helicopter was part of a different mission and at least 30 minutes behind theirs. His account is supported by two of the pilots of Mr. Williams’s own helicopter, Christopher Simeone and Allan Kelly, who said in an interview that they did not recall their convoy of helicopters coming under fire. After the initial piece aired on NBC in 2003, Mr. Summerlin and his crew went looking for reporters on their base in Kuwait to tell them about the inaccuracies in Mr. Williams’s reporting. Instead, they wound up leaving notes in several news vans encouraging them to get in touch. Years later, they were still frustrated by Mr. Williams’s recounting.

“When he was on the air on the Letterman show, I was going crazy,” Mr. Simeone said. “I was thinking ‘This guy is such a liar and everyone believes it.’ ”

Well, of course. Nobody in Big Media was going to tell them different.

P.S. I love this bit from the New York Times story linked above:

It’s not unprecedented for a public figure to exaggerate his or her experiences, especially when it comes to military conflict. In 2008, then presidential candidate Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged that she had misspoken when she described having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.

She “had misspoken.” Yeah. Her claim was a lie and got four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact checker. But the NYT is going to say she “misspoke” because calling the lie a lie won’t do — not when she is going to be the Democrat nominee for President in 2016.

In a speech earlier this week, she talked about “landing under sniper fire” and running for safety with “our heads down.” . . . Footage from CBS shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Watch for yourself as she ducks her head and runs:

Maybe we can get Brian Williams to “moderate” one of the debates Candy Crowley style, and “correct” the GOP nominee when he calls her a liar on this issue. “Actually, the New York Times said she merely ‘misspoke.’ Can you please move on, sir?”

Ain’t Big Media great?


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0613 secs.