“We’ll do it live!”
The degree to which the left has rallied to shift the focus way from Brian Williams is impressive. Anything to protect one of their boys. Gotta love it.
This is absolutely untrue. Folks on the left in general have supported Williams’s suspension, or gone even further to call for his firing (as I have done). The really interesting contrast is with the right-wing folk. Have YOU called for anything similar for O’Reilly?
Not really. I don’t have a problem with the BW suspension nor would I fault NBC if they fired him. Fox’s refusal to address the issue or start an investigation shows that there is a difference between Fox and a legitimate news organization. If Brian Williams or even Rachel Maddow threatened a NYT reporter I’d be quite willing to join the clamor for their dismissal.
The thing that shocks me most about the whole thing was that Billo The Clown once worked for CBS. To think that the Tiffany Network hired that scumbucket is hard for me to wrap my brain around.
Give him time. He hasn’t even made it through Tawana Brawley, or Al Gore inventing the internet, or Climategate with a side order of Chappaquiddick.
I’m surprised it took another person’s mistake for people to notice Bill’O’s many many lies and failings. Too bad he has no morals, nor does his network, to take a leave of absence or be punished for lying for decades. Its another example of how the bar for Fox has been so lowered that even liars and racists there are not slammed with public outcry. I mean, would you protest if you monkey throw shit? Its what they do, there’s no unlearning that
News people don’t have this kind of status or profile in the UK …
America’s cult of the newscaster-hero has swallowed itself
apropos - warning: by a British journo.
Count me as another lefty who thinks BW should be fired (as I wrote in that thread). That has nothing to do with O’Reilly’s whoppers, though, and Fox’s very different response to the questions being raised about his credibility reveals a lot about that network.
Gotta love those straw men!
And I’m surprised that the only thing that seems to get any traction are lies about one’s personal experiences. O’Reilly’s show regularly propogates lies and half-truths about important issues, while other Fox hosts like Hannity make O’Reilly look like Walter Cronkite. It seems to me that lying about what the President did or said, or about issues of critical national importance, should have far more serious consequences than lies that merely embellish an anchorman’s resume, but for whatever reason, that’s not what happens.
Who do you see defending Williams here, magellan01? Where’s a good example of it? 
O’Reilly’s getting slammed here for several reasons, starting with his hypocrisy about slamming Williams when his own lies are far more extensive and more comical. The fun of watching his head explode when called out on something is another. The fun of watching cognitively-dissonant posters trying to restore spin is a bonus.
The depth of this absurdity is even deeper than I realized at first. If you look at virtually any leftist commentary on Williams’s fall from grace, what you’ll find is irritation that Williams is being condemned for relatively trivial lies instead of for his fundamentally dishonest water-carrying for the chickenhawks who started the Iraq War. Leftists tend to despise Williams.
What shifted the focus away from Williams was his six-month suspension, which virtually everyone understands will become permanent. In other words, he’s finished. Since he didn’t commit a crime, there’s nothing more that can be done to him. Nobody is saying it’s OK because O’Reilly did it.
To the extent that there’s any validity to the suggestion - and there may or may not be - it’s not that anyone is trying to shield BW personally.
It’s that people may be trying to counter the broader narrative of a member of the left-leaning MSM being found to be unreliable, by pointing to a prominent RW media member as being just as unreliable or worse.
Don’t you think O’Reilly’s *own *choleric denunciations of Williams play a role here?
From everything I’ve seen, that’s just a LW talking point, and actually BOR was relatively restrained in commenting about BW.
Most likely the topic of fibbing newsmen was hot so MJ felt it was ripe for looking into BOR at this time. But it’s also possible that there was a RW/LW angle in there as well. MJ is a pretty LW outlet.
That said, the bottom is that for whatever reason it is that they decided to after BOR, fact is that they got him.
Can you cite an example of his “choleric denunciation” of BW?
<nitpick>
Colombian conflict (1964–present)
Colombia has been in a state of war continuously since 1964. FARC, ELN, M-19 and other assorted paramilitary groups and narco bosses have kept them busy.
</nitpick>
I’ll confess that I haven’t heard David Corn say anything about Brian Williams, but I seriously doubt he’s a fan.