"‘Did something happen to [my] head?"

"Brian Williams’s fabrication was just the latest, and worst, of the debacles that have plagued NBC News since NBCUniversal was bought by Comcast in 2011." Excerpt...

Turness learned the startling news: the most important person at the network, the face of NBC News, its anchorman Brian Williams, had apparently been exaggerating an anecdote about coming under fire in a U.S. Army helicopter during the Iraq war in 2003. A reporter from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes had called about it that morning. Williams was supposed to talk to him off the record in an effort to determine what the reporter planned to write. Instead, to the dismay of NBC’s P.R. staff, Williams had gone on the record and admitted he hadn’t been telling the truth, not only on a Nightly News broadcast the previous week but also over the years at public appearances and on talk shows.

Stunned, Turness was still trying to grasp the gravity of the situation when the Stars and Stripes story went online. At that point her biggest concern was the apology Williams was preparing to read to viewers on his broadcast that evening. He was already taping segments as he and Turness began swapping e-mails on its all-important wording. Turness and the other executives who had gotten involved quickly became frustrated, as they would remain for days, with Williams’s inability to explain himself. “He couldn’t say the words ‘I lied,’ ” recalls one NBC insider. “We could not force his mouth to form the words ‘I lied.’ He couldn’t explain what had happened. [He said,] ‘Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head?’ He just didn’t know. We just didn’t know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best [apology] we could get.” (read more)

Where is Brian Williams?

A "rare" photo of Lincoln taken with war correspondent, Brian Williams. (h/t AllenS)

linear face

Straight up, I do not know anything about Brian Williams although I am familiar with him and I did recognize his voice. I would not have been able to place his network. Having him thrust upon my awareness and now paying attention, I am struck foremost how disjointed his face. It's silly, I know, but I cannot let it go. It interferes with everything because I keep wondering, how did his face get like that? He looks like he's been punched. Really hard. His face is actually segmented distinctly with each segment out of joint, like a short caterpillar in motion, with the nose in the central segment out of joint with the rest of the features. the mouth out of alignment with the eyes. His is singularly the most asymmetrical face I've payed attention to in a long time. It's fascinating.

He is a big deal to a lot of people and this shows how accepting all those people are. 

Are we not told symmetrical faces are considered more appealing, more trustworthy, at least more trusted? 

This example runs counter to that. With Brian Williams, a lot of people trust an asymmetrical face.

Maybe they trust the soothing assuring knowing baritone intonations of the asymmetrical face. I do not know. 

When you consider all this misalignment he is not actually ugly, his features not so displaced that they're disqualifying for television. 

Did he get in a fight? 

I feel sorry for him being punched so hard his features were shifted. I did a few anims of government people I saw on t.v., showing them being punched really hard or smacked with a pan leaving their features rearranged and that is what I see in every single instance of Google images for Brian Williams, a fist come in from right and solidly punch symmetric Brian Williams leaving asymmetric Brian Williams behind to struggle through with a career in... what?... in television. I didn't even use the best example. 

KLEM TV

These never get old:

Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart brushes his hands off, "My work here is done." 

Or perhaps even he's become tired of his own schtick. 

Lord knows I sure have, decades ago.

This is Molly Shannon, center, as United States news consumer between Jon Stewart's fake news and Brian William's hopelessly slanted news in an endless body slam of disco news and current events dance. That at long last ends.

They are both anachronistic, Stewart and Williams are, not Molly, she's timeless.

They both remind me of the restaurant owners that Gordon Ramsay and Robert Irvine try so hard to save from themselves who cannot change out of sincere loyalty to long term customers who are insufficient to sustain the business in changing times that left them behind. They both serve generations that are not so important anymore as they were. Young people don't care about either of these two. They see right through the smug sanctimony that buys them nothing and leaves them holding the bag.

I did catch a bit of Jon Stewart yesterday. That was odd, to submit to that. Rachel Maddow was explaining. She was over-explaining, actually, walking us by the hand through Liberallandia, sounding as if choking on reading her jarring copy. Her copy was ordinary, but her reading of it is choppy and jarring. She is a terrible reader, and I mean terrible and exceedingly difficult to heed. I was trying to test my tolerance to see how long it would take before I was driven off when she tossed out an example of what makes Jon Stewart so great. She showed a Jon Stewart video. Goodness, the man is impossible to avoid.

In the clip Stewart was saying something on his own show ostensively serious but with the background titled, "Mess-o-potamia." Nothing slanted there, he says something obvious, sensible, levelheaded on the personal level with no application on the geopolitical level, behaved comically nonplussed, then mugged for the camera, the audience applauds.

Ugh.

Maddow herself acknowledges Stewart offers satire "fake" news then asserts we must acknowledge Stewart is the legitimate source of valid news for a lot of people. She plays it both ways in a single sentence. *click*

An audience!

So which was it all along, Pumpkin, fake or legitimate? You cannot have it both ways, but of course you do, and that is why Jon  Stewart was rejected by sensible people as anything other than comedian from the start.

We love biting cutting wry life and world observations presented dryly as satire such as comedians provide. We do appreciate news analyzed and viewed as if from above, but it is impossible to appreciate analysis so meta that we are no longer part of it, elevated aloof on one leg, and told where to applaud as trained seals at jokes, jabs, and japes aimed at flattering our own sanctimonious, moral, ethical, intellectual self-regard.

Finally, today a young man asked for my ID and I handed him my opened wallet. He took the information he needed from the driver's license then remarked on another card identifying the holder as FRB employee. Now all the people in the room know he is a big snoop and our private conversation is that public. He read a tiny logo on a card. I told him I no longer work, that they shifted my status. He flipped them (the imaginary FRB) the double bird on my behalf. He has large hands. They formed two large menacing middle finger birds that fired like repeating mortar fire. I told him I actually liked working there a lot. It always surprises me when young people say something deeply insightful, he said, "They should be abolished. It's just that I am against fiat currency." And I thought, "Now, here's an interesting young fellow who is fierce." By using the word "fiat" he is saying money is make believe. He is saying that he does not have faith in U.S. currency, that is, no faith in the political parties that manage the government that backs the currency. It does get down to trust, and young people I talk to don't have it. A single random anecdotal fellow today, I doubt he'd care the slightest about Williams, Stewart, or even Maddow for that matter. Nor do I.

"In his words: Brian Williams’ interview with Stars and Stripes"

From the Stars and Stripes reporter Travis Tritten's interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. Williams is asked how he could misremember what aircraft he was on. See the full story at: www.stripes.com/go/brianwilliams



For the rest of the interview go here

[Chip edit]

I just finished this, not what?, 3 minutes ago. I itshay you otnay. So, I might as well had stick it here.

Honestly, I never listen to the guy. I just don't. This whole thing means nothing to me except further proof the whole industry is shoddy and not needed. The way his stories are corrected shows we do not not him nor his whole industry. A lot of people still watch, but I do not know who that would be.

Brian Williams' comments about dead bodies, Hurricane Katrina draw scrutiny

"Williams’ account of seeing a body float by in the French Quarter — which remained largely dry — and even a claim of catching dysentery from drinking Katrina floodwaters have raised eyebrows among bloggers and elsewhere since he took it on the chin this week over a claim that he rode in a helicopter that was downed by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq."

“I was instead in a following aircraft. We all landed after the ground fire incident and spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert,” Williams said Wednesday. He painted his earlier description as a “bungled attempt” to thank an Iraq War veteran...

Last year, in an interview with Tom Brokaw, the man he replaced in the anchor chair at NBC, Williams said:

“My week, two weeks there was not helped by the fact that I accidentally ingested some of the floodwater. I became very sick with dysentery, our hotel was overrun with gangs, I was rescued in the stairwell of a five-star hotel in New Orleans by a young police officer. We are friends to this day. And uh, it just was uh, I look back at total agony.”

But the French Quarter, the original high ground of New Orleans, was not impacted by the floodwaters that overwhelmed the vast majority of the city.

"Brian Williams Lied About Being Shot Down During Iraq War"

 Try this link if the video fails to play
 

Here is Williams telling his tall war tale to Letterman (around 3:30)
 

Again, try this link if the video fails to play