NBC news anchor Brian Williams has been raked over the coals since word got out that he was never in a chopper crash in Iraq as he had falsely reported. He probably said it to exaggerate and thereby emphasize the perils of chopper flying in peace and worse yet, in war. For example, my NSC American counterpart at the White House as note taker, during Cory’s first US visit, held me back when I was about to join the two presidents in the US presidential chopper. He muttered, “Don’t.” He and I took a car to catch up with our bosses. “A chopper is a flying rock; it just drops; it cannot glide,” he explained why it should be avoided if one could help it.
Media basher Ken Auletta has made a good business out of bashing journalists instead of doing journalism; some women journalists here have made unsuccessful careers out of the same endeavor because they are widely ignored by Philippine journalism as those who can’t and, therefore, preach.
Auletta compared Williams to a Hall of Fame quarterback who fathered a child out of wedlock and paid the mother millions of dollars to keep quiet so that his wife and kids wouldn’t learn of it. Actually that was admirable of Dan Marino. Most men just ditch the woman and the wife, moving on to fresher meat.
Williams has gone on leave. Auletta thinks it should be permanent if Williams’s other harmless stories turn out to be fabrications, as well; such as that he saw a body float past his hotel window after Katrina.
He said this to convey the extent of the destruction and to emphasize the wanton neglect by the federal and state governments days after the storm.
Williams did not say he was with the troops that first breached Baghdad or that he jumped from his window into the flood to save someone who turned out to be already dead—and he did not claim to have invented the Internet. All Williams said was that he figured in a chopper accident; and by sheer coincidence and no prescience, he saw a corpse float by. In neither story did he claim any sterling quality for himself, not even journalistic enterprise. He just happened to be, as, indeed, he was, in Iraq; and he just happened to be, as, indeed, he was, in New Orleans. What he falsely claimed to have experienced reflected no credit on him. It could have happened to anyone in those destroyed places. All this in a war that was justified by lies disseminated by the media, whose savage conduct was covered up by the same, after half-a-million kids had already died from US sanctions though you wouldn’t know it if you depended on the New York Times; and where the words “Mission Accomplished” out of the US president’s mouth were immediately refuted by the defeat of the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Between Williams’s trivial inventions and the serious faces of journalists repeating a government’s lies, and looking serious as if the lies were true—pretty much what’s happened here since President Aquino took over, I’ll take Williams as should you.