Monday, February 9, 2015

Brian Williams, and Media Misremembering

NBC Nightly News anchor
Brian Williams
NBC News anchor Brian Williams is under fire, for all the stories he told about being under fire were actually fabricated. He was not riding in a helicopter hit by enemy fire during the War in Iraq, and now stories about his direct contact with the fear and alarm during Hurricane Katrina are under investigation.

He probably did  not save any puppies.

Another report suggests that he did not drop out of college.

For all these allegations, and more of them getting substantiated, the greater media cover-up is not that Williams had a history of making up stories about his history.

It is the water-carrying mainstream media which has ignored, justified, or outright covered up the Obama's Administration's floodgate of corruption, fraud, and impeachable offenses.

The worst scandal of 2014, the secret waiting lists for the Veterans Administration hospitals, came and went within one month. Where was the long-term reporting to expose the incompetence of the federal government handling health care?

Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer argued correctly that President Obama could jump from one scandal to the next, with nothing to fear, because the media would whitewash the harm and wrongdoing, or not report it altogether.

On Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer reacted to the news that Eric Shinseki, the secretary of the veterans affairs at the time of around revelations of VA Hospital mismanagement were reported, was not completely forthright with his knowledge of the situation concerning those hospitals.

According to Krauthammer, that news surfacing just now is proof that stonewalling as a means of damage control works, as it has worked for the Obama administration in the instance and others.
“Exactly right – it shows that stonewalling works, particularly if the press is on your side,”
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Krauthammer said. “The story comes out now. Nobody cares. It’s over the Christmas vacation. I guarantee you it’s not going to be on page one anywhere in America. Probably not be on page eight. It will go away like the wind without anyone noticing. So, if you can stonewall long enough, what we are learning with the IRS scandal, which is exactly the same thing, it can work.”

No wonder Andrew Breitbart talked about the importance of upending the current liberal-leaning bias of the mainstream media, call the press "the wall that we need to climb over in order for our voices to be heard."

While the past two years, liberal news anchors offering offensive remarks have been forced to apologize or resign, these accounts focus on the personal failings of individual reporters. #BrianMisremebers is a nice Twitter meme, but the deeper problem of Media Misremembering, of press bias or ignorance and neglect still needs to be challenged, then changed.

Fox News Anchor Chris Wallace presented to Daily Show guest Jon Stewart many clips about media bias, including one where ABC's Diane Sawyer distorted the Arizona law, which was never designed to target minorities, but was intended to empower law enforcement to check driver's ID in a  traffic stop to ascertain whether the individual was a legal citizen or not. That is not a racist policy at all, never meant to target or limit individuals of a different ethnic background or skin color.

There have been bright spots in the media where reports and news anchors hold their guests accountable for their remarks and demand answers, with no soft-ball questions to make evasion of the issues easy.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer blasted US Senator Barbara Boxer for distorting her own record on tax cuts, and her misplaced remarks about the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 (which President Obama made permanent for the 99.9% in this country).

MSNBC's Nora O'Donnell refused to let career Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Torrance) get away with admitting that she did not read the stimulus bill of 2009.

Even ABC's "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos forced President Barack Obama to admit that Obamacare was a tax-riddled bill.

We need more of our reporters holding politicians accountable like this on live television. Unfortunately, too much of the failures of government, including the horrors of inner city abortion clinics, the exorbitant salaries of labor union leaders, or the fact that California labor unions colluded with Big Business to ban plastic bags in the state of California.

Brian Williams on the Moon

While the self-immolation of Brian Williams on national television of telling whoppers about his past life and present reporting, the ongoing culture of liberal accommodation and political posturing for President Obama and the Democratic Party remains, and the American public, including Middle America and the growing conservative contingent in this country, should also demand that the mainstream media stop misremembering and expose the faults and the folly of all politicians.

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