Saturday, June 20, 2015

BRIAN WILLIAMS, EH, SA-GA? REALLY, IS THIS NEWS WE'RE ACTUALLY GIVING A SHIT ABOUT?



I've been noticeably absent from mentioning anything about Brian Williams and I'll be honest, I'm kinda surprised it's a big deal, at all. Not that the crime or the penalty are off in some way, but..., are we still in a "Broadcast News" world where this even matters? Is this relevant? I mean, symbolically I guess and yeah, it's one of numerous bad decisions NBC News had made over the recent years, you know, the kind of dumb things that Media Matters gets a hard-on for bringing up, like David Gregory's wretched reign on "Meet the Press". And yeah, Brian Williams is a bit more of a showman than an anchorman. We've all read some of the stories, how he loved going on the talk shows and guest appearing on "30 Rock" and other shows, submitting his name to replace Jay Leno, seriously (Well, seriously to him anyway) and the worse of his actions was how he apparently squashed some major news stories in favor of more light-hearted entertainment pieces. (Hey, I'm an entertainment blogger, not the "NBC Nightly News")

Really though, is this really important? A trust issue of all things with the "Nightly News", in this day and age? Hey, I know that "The Newsroom" was the best show on TV until it was canceled as well but-eh, I did regard that show as a romantic ideal of what a news show should be, but maybe it is more realistic. (Will McAvoy was purportedly loosely based on Brian Williams) That said, he exaggerated a few things, and they weren't even parts on the news, as far as I've noticed. He told lies on talk shows. Honestly, I don't think he did much worst than what Hillary Clinton exaggerated about during the '08 campaign, remember that? No? Exactly. She added drama to a story that was relatively benign and she got caught for it, that was it.

And yeah, I generally always liked Brian Williams as an anchor. Oh, don't worry I think he's earned losing the job to Lester Holt, who I like more but I also enjoyed watching him. I thought he was the natural choice and successor to tom Brokaw and I wish NBC had done more with his "Rock Center" brainchild, which was an interesting and insightful Primetime news magazine show; I'd rather see that than the other shitstain on NBC News's repertoire of shows, the goddamn insufferable "Dateline".

I'll admit also to being generally, NBC bias; I can't help it. I grew up in the two decades of MUST SEE TV where they absolutely ruled Primetime, so I always turned to their news programs first the way I turn to NBC first for everything. (Admittedly nowadays, I now change the channel after turning to them most of the time.) Still though, this is a day and age when MSNBC is a more relevant news source than NBC. Hell, Comedy Central is a more relevant news organization these days than NBC News. I don't know who really get their news on network these days. That's not something i think of as something prideful of this modern world; I like the idea of a nightly news broadcast, being an overall collective of the day's news, formatted like a newspaper. Headlines, politics, weather, stocks, sports, special interest, etc. etc. It's bad enough that most of my news (Annoyed chuckle, "My news")  comes from my Facebook wall, but it's worst that that news is filtered through my so-called "Preferences".

Anyway, I guess what I'm mostly wondering is-eh, well, how big a deal is this really? Okay, Brian Williams got caught in a few lies, but, to paraphrase Frank Fontana, "It's Brian Williams, Murphy! Forget about it!" that's what I think about this mostly, and yet, the media's covering it like it's really a major story. I mean, NBC is suddenly having issues with who should be in control of a flagship program, big fucking shock! (Eye roll) I know, it's the media covering the media and everybody's head is up everybody's asses but can we all stop pretending that this is, in any sense of the term, a "real news story"? This ain't the age of Edward R. Murrow, let's move from caring about the pretenders of the throne and care about actual news? I know, I'm sounding a bit hypocritical here, but, I mean, even in the entertainment world news, this story's relevance, ran out like, a decade ago at least.

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