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?