Brian Williams Said a Lot — But Not the One Word That Mattered

Last updated on: June 22, 2015 at 11:20 am by Kate O'Hare

Brian Williams Said a Lot — But Not the One Word That Mattered 2015-06-22T11:20:44-08:00 Kate O'Hare

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Over at my other home, CatholicVote, I had my say about “NBC Nightly News” anchor and managing editor Brian Williams, who survived revelations of his long history of public lies and exaggerations, only to fall very, very far … into a news-reporting chair on MSNBC.

How many aspiring or out-of-work journalists — who haven’t told self-aggrandizing falsehoods about themselves and news events on latenight TV and the lecture circuit– would have liked that spot?

Well, sorry guys, you don’t have whatever pixie dust Williams — a graduate of a Catholic high school and Catholic University of America — used to slide through, no doubt with at least a few million of his contract still in his pocket.

And he never had to actually say he was a lying liar.

Here’s a taste:

Now, after a sojourn in NBC purgatory, Williams is coming back. After doing an obligatory mea culpa interview on Friday, June 19, with Matt Lauer on “Today,” he’ll now be doing breaking news and special events on NBC’s sister news-cablenet MSNBC.

The best words to describe Williams’ interview with Lauer are not “shockingly honest,” as his loyal NBC colleague Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” said on Friday.

Better words are obfuscation, weaseling and deflecting, as Williams used passive voice and phrasing that implied that somehow this situation fell from the sky on his head, and he’s just not sure how it all happened. He blamed his “ego,” his need to feel important, etc. Like this:

Matt, it is clear that afterward, when I got out of the building, when I got out of the realm, I used a double standard. Something changed. I got sloppier and I said some things that were not true.

“Sloppy” is what you say when you don’t fact-check a name or a number. It’s not the word to refer to claiming that you were riding in a Chinook helicopter in Iraq when it came under enemy fire (which it didn’t), or that you saw a dead body (or bodies) floating by in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (which he didn’t).

Click here to read the rest.

Image: “Today” screenshot

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