Friday morning on Fox and Friends, Geraldo Rivera, echoing Rathergate, the 2004 scandal which put the blogosphere and New Media on the map to stay and accelerated its growth, reacted to the Brian Williams debacle by denouncing those criticizing the NBC Nightly News anchor "from the safety of their mother's basement," telling them that they should just "shut up."
Saturday, in a pair of tweets reacting to Williams' decision, quoting from the anchor's internal memo, "to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days," Rivera expressed sharp disappointment, saying that Williams should "stand & fight." But in an epic fail, the Twitter account to which he linked in one of his rants belongs to a different Brian Williams.
In a video segment originally posted at Truth Revolt and also carried at Downtrend.com, Geraldo also resisted the idea that Williams should be severely punished for "one incident":
Transcript (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Doocy: The cover of the New York Post today. That's Brian Williams, who heads up the NBC Nightly News. The headline is, "A nose for news." And there is the Pinocchio thing going there. There is a report in the New York Post, Geraldo, that says that Brokaw wants him fired, that he should go because he made up a story and kept telling it even though NBC senior officials said, "Brian, stop telling that story. We know it's made up."
Rivera: I want to know more about the second part of what you said before I really voice an opinion. Where were his producers over the years? Didn't they tell him that's not the way it happened? If the story--
Doocy: Apparently they did.
Rivera: Well, if he defied his own colleagues to tell a story that he didn't misremember but intentionally conjured up, that's a far more grievous offense than if he just, you know, conflates, a lot of people conflate. You know, it is sad, you get busted for it, you apologize for it---
Doocy: You've been in combat. You've had many opportunities to make a story really good and add stuff to it.
Rivera: But I don't -- what I don't want, Steve, is people to pile on and destroy a man's entire career for this one incident. I mean, let's go slow. In March of 2003, I was with the 101st Airborne. I was in those dust storms. I drew a line in the sand that I barely survived and had to apologize for a million times, even though it was an inconsequential --
Doocy: With your foot.
Rivera: Absolutely harmless error, people watched. The one thing I don't like, and I’ll say this right now -- why is it that the loudest voices condemning Brian Williams never served in combat, were never combat reporters? I think that all these people with Twitter accounts who are attacking this person from the safety of their mother's basement should shut up and let the soldiers and the G.I.s deal with this. Brian Williams, whatever happened, they'll sort it out. People don't want to watch him (video ends at this point — Ed.), they can change the channel.
Well, I didn't know that the job description of a "producer" includes controlling your host's every movement so you can be sure that he never tells outright lies, even off the air.
The personal incident to which Geraldo referred involved him arguably telegraphing troop movements during the Iraq War. If that action was "inconsequential," it would seem that was only due to either ignorance or luck.
As to Rivera's reference to "one incident" involving Williams, at a very minimum it's multiple incidents relating to the same lie. But there are other possible lies connected with other unrelated incidents which aren't standing up very well to scrutiny.
As to his attack on "the loudest voices condemning" Williams, Geraldo's sentiments are best seen as a decade-later update to a media mogul's comment of surpassing arrogance made in September 2004 as a fake documents scandal in a CBS story questioning George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service enveloped the network, particularly Evening News anchor Dan Rather.
Then, Jonathan Klein, who at the time was a former CBS News executive who would a short time later became head of CNN/US, appeared on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, rising to his former network's defense by attacking those who had uncovered the truth:
It’s an important moment, because you couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances, and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks.
The historical record clearly shows that the "guys" in pajamas, armed with thoughts and facts, were right, and that Rather and CBS, despite the network's vaunted “multiple layers of checks and balances,” were wrong. The network admitted that it couldn't verify key documents used, and fired four people involved with the story. Rather's last Evening News broadcast was in March 2005; he officially left the network in June 2006. To this day, Rather delusionally insists that the documents involved have not been "proven false."
As to the tweets, here they are (direct links here and here; HT Twitchy):
The @BrianWilliams Twitter account referenced in the second tweet is not that of the NBC anchor.
"Courage wins," seen in Rivera's second tweet, is yet another echo from what came to be known as Rathergate a decade ago, as "Courage" was the last word Dan Rather used in his final Evening News broadcast.
I'm not sure that Geraldo Rivera wants to remembered as the Jonathan Klein of the Brian Williams scandal, but he's well on his way to having that be his destiny.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
