Wednesday, February 11, 2015

The Swift Boating of Brian Williams

The Swift Boating of Brian Williams

by Bill Onasch

Just, as a union officer, I defended many workers facing unjust or overly harsh employer discipline over the years at Litton Microwave and the Kansas City ATA , I now rise in defense of Brian Williams.

I should make clear from the outset that my sympathy for a victim of hypocritical character assassination as well as a brutal employer is in no way an endorsement of the mediocre blend of entertainment, feel good tales, weather stories and ruling class propaganda that is marketed by all American owned networks as news. None are in the same league as Aljazeera America, who give a superior imitation of the way the BBC once was. To acknowledge Williams is the best of the domestic lot is faint praise indeed.

Williams is no more responsible for this corruption of journalism than the workers at the Kansas City nuclear weapons plant are to blame for the arms race. He has been very well paid to follow the marching orders of those who shape our knowledge and opinions about world events. Occasionally he has taken some relatively bold initiatives such as interviewing Edward Snowden and doing a live broadcast from Havana. But mostly he has been a loyal company man.



Until last week, the NBC Nightly News anchor was the most watched and trusted news reader in the USA. My wife Mary and I usually watched him, without trusting, while eating our supper to find out what we were supposed to know and think. Now Williams is on a six-month suspension without pay with a strong possibility of discharge after an ongoing company investigation.

The union sisters and brothers I represented were not always paragons of virtue. But, except for some extreme cases such as sexual harassment or bullying, even when the company could make a case for just cause fair play called for giving offenders a second chance after discipline of proportional response.

Williams got in to trouble not for making Walter Cronkite, where ever he may rest, turn over in disgust with today's news format. He became a target for inaccurately retelling events happening during the fog of war twelve years ago. When corrected by GIs who were there with him he apologized. As Special Agent Gibbs could have warned, this was taken as a sign of weakness. Blood was in the water.

Bolstering one's connection to events through subsequent recollections over time is a fairly common trait. It's a variation of what the Celtic ancestry I share with Williams calls blarney—a bit of a fib that intends and does no harm.

Certainly his bragging is no where near the scale of the lie told by the President of the United States, and his co-conspirator British Prime Minister, that led Williams to accompany the invasion of Iraq—a war crime that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, still counting today. All of the news networks were complicit in that lie, some actively promoting it through false reports planted by the administration.

It doesn't even match up to the slander of a fellow sailor, and former Governor of Minnesota by the “hero” in American Sniper.

As far as credibility, Doris Kearns Goodwin has made a ton of money from books, films, and television after settling two charges of plagiarism.

But Brian Williams is getting the same kind of treatment as stirred up by the ultra-right backed “Swift Boat Veterans” smearing the validity of the Purple Heart awarded to then Presidential candidate John Kerry during his Navy swift boat service in Vietnam. No expense is being spared to comb through every word spoken by Williams on or off the air that can be used to end the career of a trusted anchor who is just too “liberal” for the cracked tea pots. They want to send a message to anybody who might think about improvising their script.

Jon Stewart seriously summed up on his satiric Comedy Channel Daily Report how this incident should be handled. Williams got caught in a silly fib. He's been embarrassed. He's apologized. That should be the end of story.

I didn't vote for John Kerry when he ran for President and I've never before had any kind words for Brian Williams. But I'm against witch-hunt intimidation no matter who the target and I recoil against unjust employer discipline even against an employee making ten million a year.

Put Brian Williams back to work!










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