February 5, 2015, - 12:38 pm
How Does This Guy Still Have a Job?; Meet the Others Who Also Got Away With It
News You Can Trust.
You have to wonder how on earth Brian Williams still has a job in “journalism,” let alone THE job as anchor of “NBC Nightly News.” He didn’t “misremember” the false story he’s been passing off as truth about being in a helicopter that was shot down. He just flat out lied. He lied and he lied and he lied. And he embellished. So did two people on “the right” who are frequently on FOX News, and you’ll read more about them, below.
To take the temperature of what a big deal this is, #BrianWilliamsMisremembers has been among the top Twitter hashtags in the United States since last night. (I’ll post some of my tweets about it a little later (follow me on Twitter).) NBC should have immediately fired Williams. But the network not only didn’t fire him, they’ve kept him in his anchor seat. This is a man for whom the network regularly runs commercials (complete with voice-overs from his Hollywood pal, Michael Douglas) declaring that Williams is a man we can trust, that he’s accurate, etc. PUH-LEEZE. I never believed that crap. In fact, the only thing I believed on NBC News were the endless biased, incestuous stories about how Williams’ daughter Allison got the job in NBC’s live broadcast of “Peter Pan” all because of her incredible talent. Oh, wait, I don’t think I bought that story, either.
But, now, Williams has been caught in a big lie–a lie he told more than once on the air, on the newscast. A lie that he kept embellishing ever more each time he told it, including on “Late Night With David Letterman.” The guy should resign. Or, better yet, NBC News should fire him. Immediately.
But Williams isn’t the only one.
And you might say, “Can you imagine if someone at FOX News lied like this? The media would be all over it, and they’d be fired.” But you would be wrong.
FOX News paid contributor and syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and phony “terrorism expert” “Brigitte Gabriel,” whose real name is Hanan Kahwaji Tudor and is also frequently on FOX News, both made up stories–big lies–in order to get noticed and make gazillions.
They Also “MisRemembered”: Michelle Fraudkin, Hanan Kahwaji Tudor a/k/a “Brigitte Gabriel”
Malkin made a name for herself through a column in which she completely fabricated a story about a Senator calling her, sight unseen, and asking her to move in with him when she was a college intern. The story was obviously fake. She completely made it up to get attention at a time when she couldn’t get noticed or even arrested. And it worked. She not only wrote a column containing the apocryphal story–with her syndicator Creators never demanding any proof–but she then repeated it on C-SPAN, declining to name the fictional Congressman because he never existed and it never happened. She credited that phony story with getting her a contract with FOX News.
At the time, Congressman Gary Condit was under fire for his affair with the missing (and we now know, dead) Chandra Levy. Also at that time, Malkin couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to her, couldn’t get any TV appearances. The overly solicitous Malkin repeatedly e-mailed me, like a weird stalker fan, every time I was on FOX News talking about a column I wrote about the Congressman I once worked for, Donald “Buz” Lukens, who was arrested and prosecuted for having sex with an underage prostitute. And, so, “All About Eve”-style, she suddenly “remembered” a story that never happened and wrote a column about it. The column was so hard to believe that even one of her editors told me it was obviously fabricated. The column was about how she was looking for housing in Washington, DC while in college when she planned to be an intern there, the following summer. The phantom politician purportedly magically obtained Malkin’s phone number at random from her college and called her, sight unseen, asking her to live with him for the summer. The story is so clearly fantasy that she refuses to name this non-existent person. Here’s a tip: when a story defies credulity, it’s because it isn’t credible.
But like I said, it worked. Fake it ’til ya make it. While FOX News will call Williams on it–as the network did repeatedly yesterday and today, it won’t ever do the same for Fraudkin. Ditto for “Gabriel” a/k/a Kahwaji Tudor.
“Brigitte Gabriel” a/k/a Hanan Kahwaji Tudor, a Palestinian Muslim who parades as a Lebanese Maronite Christian, has built a post-9/11 career making up fanciful stories. Ghostwriters wrote a whole book filled with the fake stories, some of which have already been disproven and many of which are obviously phony to anyone with any common sense and even a modicum of critical thinking skills. As with Malkin, proof was never demanded for any of her fanciful fairy tales. Whatever she wrote and claimed, no matter how impossible, was gullibly accepted as truth. And she kept embellishing, just like Brian Williams. The editors of “her” books never did any fact-checking nor did they do a shred of work to verify her claims. And, yet, many demand that critics disprove her rake stories which she never proved were true in the first place.
On this site, I’ve already debunked “Gabriel”/Kahwaji Tudor’s new false claim that she was a “Palestinian human shield,” a charade presented on the air as fact by FOX News’ Megyn Kelly without an iota of fact-checking. And I’ll be debunking a lot more of her fakery at some point in the future. Stay tuned.
And, given all this, FOX News and NBC News, are morally equivalent in their lack of credibility. Fake and balanced.
Note that while liberal media figure Brian Williams has been fact-checked and debunked, Malkin and Tudor haven’t been. Williams should be out of a job, and if the media storm about his big lie continues along with social media mockery of his “misremembering” claim, he may soon be terminated from the NBC anchor chair. This might not just go away, as he and NBC wish it would. You can’t just sweep away and under the rug continuous lies on the air as “misremembering.”
Williams was outed by rightfully angry American troops, upset that Williams claimed to be on the helo with them when he wasn’t. But a non-existent Congressman she made up can never out Michelle Fraudkin. And non-existent Palestinians who never used Hanan Tudor as a human shield won’t out her either.
Still, their lies and con artistry don’t relieve you or FOX News from using critical thinking skills and saying, hmmm . . . how can that be true?
There are some things–many things–that defy reason and logic. And the facts.
Tags: Brian Williams, Brian Williams Lie, Brian Williams Lied, Brian Williams Misremembered, Brigitte Gabriel, Hanan Kahwaji, Hanan Kahwaji Tudor, Michelle Malkin, NBC News
What a shame that unvarnished truth has no place in this world. That’s why Michelle Fraudkin was welcomed in to the club, and you were kicked out. The human race is going to pay a terrible price for our constant denial and obfuscation.
We are witnessing every day, the voluntary, willful and quite unfortunate desire of the human race to commit mass suicide. Thank God He truly exists, and will come again some day to clean up the gargantuan mess we are about to make, . . .
yet again.
I love you, Debbie. Keep on truckin’.
Alfredo from Puerto Rico on February 5, 2015 at 12:52 pm