Are They Really Journalists? No, They are Progressives and Must Lie
The DiploMad 2.0 by noreply@blogger.com (DiploMad)
I have been following with moderate interest the current tempest over NBC news "anchor" (weird word, that) Brian Williams, and his habitual "misremembering" of apparently dramatic events in his life. I don't know if foreign readers have paid much attention to this but American ones are all aware that Williams, a fabulously well-paid "newsman" and anchor of the "prestigious" (cough!) NBC nightly news, has been caught out to be a serial fabulist.
He has been telling one whopper of a tale after another for years now to pump up his personal resume and give himself some "street creds" among the progressives who think that Williams and his ilk are intelligent, savvy, and bearers of the TRUE WORD.
Well, it turns out he has lied about saving puppies from a fire; about being robbed as a teen while working for a charity by a gun-wielding mugger on the "mean streets" of 1970s small-town Indiana; about braving Hezbollah rockets in Israel; about watching bodies float down the Mississippi River during Katrina; about seeing a man jump to his death in a football stadium; and, of course, most famously, about being aboard a chopper that got shot down in Iraq in 2003. Aside from being a serial liar, naturally, he has been one of the most fawning, outright boot-licking fans and promoters of the disaster known as President Obama. He also is a regular on progressive TV shows, where he plays the part of the wise, humorous, Hemmingway-esque man of the world, who has seen it all, and with a smirk or a wink can put down and dismiss all the deluded right-wing nuts out there. In other words, he is a hero of the Hollywood-University-Media complex which has done so much irreparable damage to our nation and to Western civilization, in general.
Williams joins others such as Dan Rather, who tried to throw an American election by pushing a patently false story about George W. Bush; Janet Cook, who concocted a much awarded narrative of an eight-year-old heroin addict; Jayson Blair, who fabricated a number of much-commented on stories for the New York Times; Sabrina Erdely of Rolling Stone who spread the UVA fake rape story; and, of course, who could forget The Lord of Them All, Commissar in Chief Walter Duranty, New York Times apologist extraordinaire for Joseph Stalin and his mass murders in Ukraine. I am sure you can name many others.
I never met Williams, but during my long career I had dealings with other prominent "anchors"--one of whom nearly ended my career--and found them universally boring and idiotic. They were just actors: make-up, lights, dramatic pose, and read lines written by young staffers from the "best" schools. There was no journalism as most of us would think of journalism. The British have it mostly right. They call persons such as Williams, "readers." That's right. They read the news to you. In one way, however, American "anchors" are not like British "readers." In our benighted Republic, these "anchors" are vastly better paid, revered, and allowed a great deal of say over what the news is, or at least, what they intend to report. If Williams, Rather, or Jennings did not want to report on something, then it simply must not have happened. That little world of the "anchor," however, took a major hit with the invention of the internet by Al "Is it Getting Warm?" Gore--another fabulist of some distinction. There are now millions of other little "anchors" who can fact check, provide alternative explanations for events, and bring sunlight to otherwise forgotten happenings and issues. Dan Rather, let us not forget, was brought down by bloggers. The internet debunked Williams. Imagine if we had had the internet in the time of Duranty, or even when the Saintly Walter Cronkite declared that we were losing in Vietnam when, in fact, we were winning . . .
There is something in the progressive mind-set that promotes, nay, requires compulsive lying. We see it in John Kerry and his fake stories of secret missions in Cambodia and his flying dog, Hillary Clinton, and her Bosnian snipers, and even in FDR who famously said words now engraved on his DC monument,
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
In fact, of course, he had seen none of those things. Those things tend not to happen in Hyde Park, New York.
The fundamental problem progressives such as Williams face, of course, is that the world is not as they would have it. Not at all. Many if not most of them have limited experience in the real world, having spent lives of wealth and privilege, sheltered in progressive educational institutions. They have very superficial knowledge of the world outside these bubbles, and rely, therefore, to a great deal on Hollywood. They incorporate the largely leftist rubbish pumped out by Hollywood into their personae.
In their world, the United States is still 1930's Alabama--or, better said, the Alabama of Hollywood. They want to unleash their inner Atticus Finch. In their world, murders in the United States are committed by middle aged white male business executives who kill black people instead of what happens in the real world where they are committed by young black men who generally kill black people. In their world, women can kung fu better and be bigger badasses than big burly guys, when, in fact, the opposite is true as is shown by the contradictory and ceaseless calls for government action to "protect" women from men. "I am woman! I am strong! Call the cops men are looking at me!" In progressive world, the KKK is equal to the Tea Party, when in the real world, the KKK was the armed wing of the Democratic Party. In their world, Western civilization is the source for all the poverty and evil in the world, when, in fact, the concepts of liberty, justice, and human rights are Western constructs.
Standard progressive activists have really done nothing very interesting, so they need to get proper credentials. They need to show that they know what's what, and that progressivist stances are what the world needs to deal with "problems," and after all isn't life just a series of problems calling for outside intervention? They want to see what they believe.
We, hence, see the progressives making up stuff. The sort of stuff that puts the progressive in the center of the battle, on the ramparts, in the muddy trenches and downed helicopters with the common schlubs. The sort of wordily experience that allows the progressive to tell us how to live our lives.
Telling lies is essential to progressivism. |
