'Vanity (Un)Fair’: We Love You, Serial Liar Brian Williams
In praise of a “rare second act."
10.26.2017
6
On Tuesday, Vanity Fair released a 2500-word letter of amore to MSNBC’s The 11th Hour host, Brian Williams, praising the anchorman’s redemptive “rare second act.” Williams had previously seen his career plummet into the depths of disgrace due to his well-earned reputation as a serial liar. However, the left-wing media is open-armed when it comes to one of their own, despite their proclaimed passion for the facts.
According Emily Jane Fox, one of Williams’s frequent guests profiled in the letter:
“Most broadcasters would have been cooked if they had undergone the sort of scandal that Williams faced in 2015. But a slow-and-steady revival — a mixture of dutiful penance, clever planning, and a dramatic change in the media — has Williams turning 11 p.m. into the new primetime.”
Williams’s “scandal” was due to his aversion to facts, established many times during his tenure at NBC, perhaps most notably when he famously referred to “a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG." Later, Williams admitted he was not in the the helicopter that was hit, but in a helicopter following behind it. However, the pilots of Williams's helicopter said their chopper was not behind the targeted copter at all, but rather, in a different company entirely. (Surely, his "PTSD" had rendered him momentarily forgetful.)
As another example of Williams’s tremendous imagination, in May 3, 2011, he said during a Nightly News broadcast that he had "the great honor of flying into Baghdad with [SEAL Team 6] at the start of the war." Later, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command informed the Huffington Post that the SEALs “do not embed journalists with…any…unit that conducts counter-terrorism missions." Furthermore, another SEAL officer told CNN, "That early in the conflict, there were only missions taking place, not bouncing between outstations.”
When Williams was speaking at a 2008 forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, he boasted that he “was at the Brandenburg Gate the night the (Berlin) wall came down.” An NBC News member notified CNNMoney that Williams, in fact, arrived the day after the wall came down.”
After a host of exposed lies, culminating in his suspension by NBC in 2015, Williams very weakly apologized to Matt Lauer in an interview, which was referenced and excused by Fox in the Vanity Fair piece:
“[Williams] may not have nailed essential questions that many observers wanted answered, but it revealed real grief — the anguish of a guy who knew he had inexplicably screwed up.”
After being suspended, according to Fox, Williams endeavored as an Everyman:
“Williams spent 'the troubles' doing a lot of reflection, and talking 'to the kinds of people in the America I grew up in.' He drove across the country and took advantage of the opportunity to get re-certified as a firefighter.”
Rounding third in the Vanity Fair lovefest, documenting Williams’s renewed — and fantastic — ascension, Fox gushed over William's hardworking, aw-shucks attitude:
“In the grittier world of late-night news, Williams recruited talent the old-fashioned way — with a little fawning, and occasional avuncular sangfroid. 'I tend to over-introduce my guests when they come on,' Williams admitted when I pressed him on the sentence-long biographies he lavishes upon guests. 'It is one of my things. We have terrific people. I will never introduce someone only as an analyst. It’s diminishing. I try to love on them. They’re doing us a terrific favor. They not only make our broadcasts better, they make our broadcast.”
The piece ended with Fox using the renovation of The 11th Hour's set as a metaphor for new beginnings:
“'The metaphors are many and obvious,'” he said. 'We all stand on great things here — and second acts are possible, with a little spiffing up.'”
Aww.
"Newscaster" Brian Williams disgraced himself over several years with outright lies in place of facts, but the leftist media have welcomed him back with a cozy hug. It’s hard to say why they’ve fawned all over his return, but two possibilities seem equally plausible: either they want him back in the fold due to his leftist convictions, or they see in him the thing they intrinsically know about themselves: being good at telling lies.
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