Excellent article -- Our dangerous macho delusions: Brian Williams’ fraudulence — and our own

[FourScore]

Monday, Feb 9, 2015 07:00 AM EST
Our dangerous macho delusions: Brian Williams’ fraudulence — and our own
The NBC anchor's fibs run deeper: He sold us war as entertainment, chicken-hawk fools as heroes. We all bought it.
Steve Almond

...If Brian Williams wanted to display genuine courage—if he was interested in actual journalism, as opposed to the elaborate construction of war propaganda—he might have spent his time in Iraq questioning the motives, costs, and intended goals of our invasion. In fact, as the bright public face of a huge journalistic army, Williams might have questioned the unctuous and ultimately bogus justifications our leaders offered for invading Iraq in the first place.

To howl about how Brian Williams has a “credibility problem” because of his famous fibs is to miss the true nature of his fraudulence: that he and his team were happy to render the Iraq War as a form of entertainment, a righteous crusade in which badass high-tech G.I. Joes defend the holy Christian homeland by slaughtering and eventually civilizing Islamic savages.

I don’t mean to single Williams or NBC out. With a few notable exceptions, the television coverage of the war was carefully stage-managed by Department of Defense. We were shown approved footage of rolling tanks and magical bombs, and precious little in the way of dead bodies, American or Iraqi. Our leaders made promise after promise about how the occupation would proceed, nearly all of which proved false...

SNIP

...Does America’s civilian culture even understand what war is anymore? That it’s not just some proving ground for the masculine ego, but an experience by which thousands of human beings—many of them women and children—are systematically killed, maimed, traumatized, and displaced? Is Brian Williams really the only American confused on this point? Or is he just the most famous one?

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/09/our_dangerous_macho_delusions_brian_williams_fraudulence_and_our_own/

[merrily]

1. Who let the D of D stage manage media coverage of the Iraq War?

Media. In the run up to the war, many cooperated. Some were active accomplices. That is not Bush's fault, even if the attempts to stage manage were.

I have read stories, fictional and not, and seen movies and documentaries about war correspondents from War War II, up to Iraq, who were not "embedded."

Our media is as almost as corrupt as our government and vice versa.

BTW, at this moment, Williams should be singled out. He lied. And then he doubled talked about conflating helicopters. Give me a break. And why? To expose corruption in government? To save a life? To meet a deadline he was too ill to meet honestly? Nope. Just to flatter his own ego.

If the American public lies down for this, we need to sit down and shut up about how bad media is.

[Bandit]

2. After the first Iraqi War the MSM

decided that War was very good business for them. They never had higher ratings than during that first war. Is it any wonder they did everything in their power to attract those same ratings...