• Welcome to the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.

NBC anchor Brian Williams "misremembers" being shot down over Iraq

 
 
 
H

hurtinbuckaroo

Contributor
Joined
Mar 7, 2003
Messages
5,894
Location
Delaware, USA
Basic Beliefs
laissez le bon temps rouler
Well, this is especially awkward for Akbar Al'Jousin who's been strutting around for years telling everyone that he's the guy who shot down Brian Williams.
 
Odd, that he bungled up what happened, when the crew knew exactly what happened. I've never been a fan of Williams. There has always been something that has put me off of him.

Don't like Anderson Cooper either. He rode the Katrina floods all the way to the bank with his fake outrage. Do we have any good news personalities left? All the good ones seem to be north of the border. Although Peter Mansbridge did have those shots of him smoking crack with the former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford come out recently.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Odd, that he bungled up what happened, when the crew knew exactly what happened. I've never been a fan of Williams. There has always been something that has put me off of him.
Click to expand...

I had liked him, because he seemed like a "regular guy", and would occasionally throw in a smart-assed quip in less serious moments. But he's become way too smug for his own good.
 
He won't and shouldn't get fired for it, because it is unlikely to be a deliberate. His own reporting at the time stated that it was a copter traveling ahead of theirs that was shot and they then landed at the wreckage site. He isn't going to decide to intentionally lie about it later.

Every human and everyone on this board tells stories about their past that are false distortions. It is a byproduct of human memory which is not actually a process of retrieval but of reconstruction. Every time a past event is thought or spoken about, it is actually reconstructed and that process winds up injecting aspects that weren't part of it, eliminating others, misremebering who did what and what happened to whom, etc.. Every things we experience afterward, including watching videos related to the event, and hearing about it from the perspective of others all interact to get mushed into how we recall it later. We only need to misremember it once and then our future memories become more about remembering that wrong retelling than directly remembering the experience itself.

In a "gothca" culture mindset, everyone wants to make a big deal of this, but its nothing, its meaningless, its harmless, and its most likely an honest mistake.
 
hurtinbuckaroo said:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...cc0-11e4-9c91-e9d2f9fde644_story.html?hpid=z3

He has claimed for years that he was in a helicopter that was downed by rocket fire. Turns out he was nowhere near the incident. His "apology" is a clusterfark of mealy-mouthed double-speak.

The Twitter mockery is classic. Odds are that he'll be looking for work by Saturday.
Click to expand...

Why would this get him fired?

The primary job of people in the mainstream media is to act as a conveyor belt for right wing lies, and this has nothing to do with that.
 
ronburgundy said:
He won't and shouldn't get fired for it, because it is unlikely to be a deliberate. His own reporting at the time stated that it was a copter traveling ahead of theirs that was shot and they then landed at the wreckage site. He isn't going to decide to intentionally lie about it later.

Every human and everyone on this board tells stories about their past that are false distortions. It is a byproduct of human memory which is not actually a process of retrieval but of reconstruction. Every time a past event is thought or spoken about, it is actually reconstructed and that process winds up injecting aspects that weren't part of it, eliminating others, misremebering who did what and what happened to whom, etc.. Every things we experience afterward, including watching videos related to the event, and hearing about it from the perspective of others all interact to get mushed into how we recall it later. We only need to misremember it once and then our future memories become more about remembering that wrong retelling than directly remembering the experience itself.

In a "gothca" culture mindset, everyone wants to make a big deal of this, but its nothing, its meaningless, its harmless, and its most likely an honest mistake.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup: This has been my view of the incident as well. I think its a simple case of a false memory, not anything nefarious like most people seem to assume. False memories are much more common than people realize. I know I have confirmed a few, and sometimes its scares the shit out of me that I may have a ton of memories in my head of things that never happened. In fact I had an incident this week where I told someone about a funny scene in an old movie (Airplane!) involving a smart ass boy, but when I went to find the clip on youtube, I discovered that it was actually a little girl, not a boy. And I had got the dialogue wrong. Blew my mind.
 
All Things Considered (on National Pinko Radio) today laid out the timeline of how the story changed, complete with audio clips.

I'd say "lie" is over the top, "misremembered" might be more accurate, but "this whole fucking thing is being blown way out of proportion" seems most appropriate.

He never claimed to have been shot down, only shot at - a story which is corroborated by the pilot. It appears in his latest telling of the story that he says the helicopter was hit by an RPG round, but that's an interpretation of what happened based upon the phrasing he used, and nothing whatsoever like him claiming to have been shot down.
 
As this story (or non-story) picks up steam - apparently Williams is now on leave - a thought came to my mind...


For the last few weeks, the number one movie at the box office in America has been "American Sniper." The subject of the movie had - to put it mildly - a penchant for "misremembering" details of his own story. Shooting gas station robbers, picking off Katrina looters, and in a case which cost his estate north of a million dollars in damages, punching out Jesse Ventura.


Now, I'm not one to buy into conspiracy theories like the former wrestler/governor, but I do find the timing of this story a bit odd.
 
I've yet to listen to the All Things Considered story but given his career choice, I hold him to a higher standard in the misremembering department. I know, misremembering is misremembering but given that he will be hard-pressed to overcome the damage this will do to his credibility in the public eye, a newsman who wants respect has to be cognizant of the context in which his message is received, yes?

On the bright side, he's very personable and has a pretty good sense of humor. I'm sure he'll land on his feet.
 
TV and credit cards said:
I've yet to listen to the All Things Considered story but given his career choice, I hold him to a higher standard in the misremembering department. I know, misremembering is misremembering but given that he will be hard-pressed to overcome the damage this will do to his credibility in the public eye, a newsman who wants respect has to be cognizant of the context in which his message is received, yes?

On the bright side, he's very personable and has a pretty good sense of humor. I'm sure he'll land on his feet.
Click to expand...

It's being reported that he also misremembered seeing a man commit suicide while he was reporting from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Apparently this was not an isolated incident.
 
President Reagan used to get his movie roles mixed up with real life. Remember when he thought his Secretarty of Agriculture was a chimp?
 
I am so loving this. Like most in the mainstream media, this guy made a career out of being a conveyor belt for right wing lies, and now all the right wingers have turned on him, and this may even cost him his job.

Maybe Karma really is a thing?
 
thebeave said:
President Reagan used to get his movie roles mixed up with real life. Remember when he thought his Secretarty of Agriculture was a chimp?
Click to expand...

Reagan apparently thought that in WW2 he was present at the liberation of the concentration camps. In fact, he never left the safety of the USA
Fox's Bill O'Reilly has been dinged for his exaggerations of his war reporting experiences also. And the Busher lied about his being AWOL.
 
Cenk Uygur's take on this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/my-ironic-defense-of-bria_b_6645320.html

This is how the system covers up for their gross failures. Every once in awhile we are offered a sacrificial lamb on a small issue that is a distraction rather than the heart of the matter. Then the media gets to walk away self-satisfied, with an unbearable smug look on their face -- as if they have ethics. Your ethics amuse me. Your faux concern over this issue is vomitous.

If there is someone in the mainstream media that didn't cheerlead for far more egregious lies that got us into the Iraq War, let them be the first to pick up a stone. The rest of you sitting in your giant glass house, either fire yourselves or shut the fuck up.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom