Should Brian Williams lose his job? Yahoo/AP

Brian Williams. Yahoo/AFP

Debate rages about what the fate of Brian Williams will be. Yahoo/AP. Brian Williams, the news anchor for NBC Nightly News, has admitted to falsely claiming that he was in a helicopter crash during the Iraq War. Some people think that Williams will survive the scandal due to high ratings for NBC Nightly News. Williams has "stepped away" from the news program for awhile. Some are calling for Brian Williams to step down or be fired. Since the scandal erupted, the ratings for NBC Nightly News has tanked. In more bad news for Williams, new accusations of embellishment have arisen over statements he made over the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. During the war Williams was in a helicopter watching Hezbollah firing rockets at Israel from a distance of six miles. Williams later claimed on The Daily Show and a speech at an university that the rockets were "just under him".

My Comment:

This is such a strange story to me. There have been so many incidents of the media either making stuff up or deliberately lying about the news to fit a narrative, I can't see how Williams embellishing his own life is even in the same category. Off the top of my head, think of how NBC edited the George Zimmerman tape to make him look racist. How about when ABC made up the "pink slime" scandal and cost the beef industry millions of dollars? And, lest we forget, Dan Rather made up a bunch of stuff about President Bush's wartime service record. In short the news media has almost no credibility in the first place. 

In short, the scandal about Brian Williams doesn't hurt my opinion about NBC news, or mainstream journalism in general, because my opinion of them could not get any lower. Should Williams be fired? Of course he should be. You can't trust someone that lies about news stories he has been involved in. But almost everyone in the media should be fired because everyone in the media lies. And compared to the lies the rest of the media makes everyday, lying about being under fire during the Iraq War is a pretty minor one. 

So what are the consumers supposed to do? My advice is to not trust one source exclusively. When I write these posts I usually use only one or two sources for citations, but I read from multiple sources. You also have to realize who is biased to what. For example, RT is clearly Russian propaganda, the Daily Mail has no credibility whatsoever, Fox News has a conservative bias and all the other major networks have either a center left or a left wing bias. Other then that there isn't much you can do other then question everything. Just because the media says something doesn't mean it is true. And, of course, that's just as true as me as it is for the media.