Discussion: NYT: NBC Reviewing New Instance In Which Brian Williams May Have Lied

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Discussion for article #235672

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Unless his infractions go well beyond the horrible things that Bill O’Reilly lied about, let’s stop this idiocy so long as he doesn’t lie as part of an actual news broadcast.

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Briney…

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fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, ahhhhh I can’t be fooled again.
expert opinion from, the guy now living in a padded room. lol

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30 years from now Brian Williams will only be remembered as an answer to a trivia question.

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good grief… how friggin long does it take for nbc to shitcan this lying embarrassment. obviously they were hoping to stretch this out long enough for the hoohaw to die down so they could reinstate him; but apparently are finding even more reasons not to… decisions… decisions.

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It’s amazing that a guy whose very livelihood consisted of reporting on-camera and being surrounded by other media could think that he wouldn’t get caught some day.

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Do you remember every detail of your life perfectly? A lot of Williams’ “lies” have far more to do with the frailty of human memory than outright lying. This isn’t like O’Reilly having claimed to have seen the bodies of murdered nuns in El Salvidor or the scene where the man committed suicide.

I know there’s a lot of people who don’t like him, but can we be honest and admit that some of the problems come down to imperfect memory and others are due to bad phraseology?

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come on! There is NO WAY you ‘remember’ things that didn’t occur. This isn’t The Big Lie - this is embellishment to make oneself look larger than the story. As Enon said: why doesn’t NBC cut its losses and let him go

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You mean like making eye contact with the guy on the lead horse in Tahrir Square? You can do that from a balcony, you know. Depends on how high up you are.

And yes, people have been known to make things up in their own memories or misremember key details. I know one person who claims up side down and sideways that her sister forced her to kiss a hot iron when they were children despite the fact that there is no evidence of scarring and no one else in the family remembers it.

Very few people have absolute perfect recollection of their lives.

There is an old Russian proverb which goes “No one lies like an eyewitness.”

So far, every single one of these purported lies told by Williams seem to come down to two things- either he misremembered them due to the temporal distance between the events and his retelling or really poor phraseology.

I do understand that there are people who don’t like Brian Williams, but so far, none of what I’ve read has indicated that these were deliberate lies intended to do anything.

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But, wait. He did actually lie as part of a news broadcast by saying he was in fact in the middle of said news stories, when he wasn’t. Journalists are supposed to be held to a higher standard than comedians like Limpball. (sic)

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And which news story was that? So far, all I’ve seen is that he’s said something along those lines long after the fact, but not during actual reporting, and in several cases, he was in the middle of the news stories.

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Let’s compare BillO lies vs Bryan lies…

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Since when is the NYT a credible source after the bullshit they spewed on the Clintons this week?

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From the NYT? Really you believe those lying turds?

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can we be honest and admit that some of the problems come down to imperfect memory and others are due to bad phraseology?

“Can we be honest?” It seems you’re (albeit inadvertently) preaching to the choir here. A plea for honesty is something you should be addressing to Williams. Either he looked the leader of a bunch of equestrians in the eye or he didn’t. It has nothing to do with “imperfect memory” or “bad phraseology.” Bottom line is most people expect their news editors to be honest and Brian Williams has been shown to be dishonest.

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As i have explained to others…I know people who will swear upside down and sideways that an event occurred when it didn’t. That they literally experienced, lived through, and remember the event as if it happened to them even if it didn’t. They aren’t lying either. They are just remembering things that they didn’t experience because human memory can be like that.

There was a study that recently came out detailing how police officers can get a person to confess to a crime in exacting detail even when that person was miles away by manipulating their memories. Stress filled experiences are actually the most likely to create altered states of memory.

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There is NO WAY you ‘remember’ things that didn’t occur.

Yes, there is. Memory is trickier than most people realize. I’ve experienced false memory myself - not anything important, but I was absolutely certain of something that I later discovered could not be true.

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30 years from now journalism will be only remembered as an answer to a trivia question.

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