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The Twitter Round-Up: Brian Williamsing, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Jetpacks

Twitter as a medium is, in some ways, a miracle. It is, after all, the reason we get to ask the question “Were politicians, reporters and people this incomprehensibly incapable of grasping reality before the Internet, or is it a new fad to be crazy?” I’m afraid that I’m not here to answer that question (though I can’t imagine the response vindicating the leaders of even our most vaunted histories of their wackiness) – no, I’m here for your entertainment.

This week’s top story (and, yes, that is a double entendre, as this one’s a whopper) features none other than Bill O’Reilly. On Thursday, the liberal magazine Mother Jones released an article entitled “Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem,” which alleged that O’Reilly had exaggerated and outright fabricated accounts of his having been in warzones in El Salvador and, variously, Buenos Aires and the Falkland Islands. O’Reilly has since responded with his trademark prepackaged eloquence, denouncing the piece’s principal author, David Corn, as a “liar” and a “guttersnipe.” Now, a definition.

Brian Williams (v):

(1) transitive: To fabricate or embellish a news report, especially for broadcast journalism. Not to be confused with Dan Rathering, or throwing journalistic caution to the wind because one desires a story to be true.

(2) passive voice: To be forced off of a nightly news broadcast because one Brian Williamsed

With those definitions in hand, let’s be clear: it seems fairly obvious that O’Reilly is guilty of Williamsing. Eric Engberg, a CBS correspondent who was in Buenos Aires with O’Reilly in 1982, denounced the novice reporter as having needlessly endangered his camera crew by violating safety directives issued by their bureau chief, Larry Doyle, who in turn had called O’Reilly “a ‘disruptive force’ who threatened his bureau’s morale and cohesion,” according to Engberg. Several other CBS correspondents who were in Buenos Aires have corroborated various parts of Engberg’s and Corn’s narratives. It’s worth noting that David Corn did not include comments from Engberg or any other CBS correspondents, not to mention any local sources, in his original Mother Jones piece, which is as inexplicable as it is apparently lazy. In any event, Fox News’ finest did have something to say in his own defense.

 

O’Reilly’s “no spin response?” He read from a New York Times article filed by Richard J. Meislin, which said that “One policeman pulled a pistol, firing five shots,” seemingly corroborating O’Reilly’s account of a combat situation. At some point, though, you, I, and this entire upside-down and inside-out world of media producers and consumers went through the looking glass, jumped the shark, and ran out of cliched aphorisms to describe the remarkably cavalier manner in which Bill O’Reilly seems to approach journalistic integrity, because the second half of that sentence reads “over the heads of fleeing demonstrators,” which, for those of you keeping score at home, is the opposite of what O’Reilly (smugly) claimed the article said.

Wait, though, because this gets better: O’Reilly didn’t stop there. The account of the Buenos Aires incident (the one disputed by contemporary reporting by Bob Schieffer, Eric Engberg, Charles Gomez, Larry Doyle and Dan Rather, all of CBS, as well as Meislin’s New York Times piece) that he related on Friday night was one of utter carnage: “The violence was horrific, as Argentine soldiers fired into the crowd, who were responding with violent acts of their own.” He doubled down once more, describing what he saw as “combat,” which leads me to my second definition of the night. Combat (n): (1): a fight or contest between individuals or groups (2): active fighting in a war : action <casualties suffered in combat.>

Nice try, Bill.  

But let’s move on to another trusted icon of the mediasphere, our friendly neighborhood — oh, it’s Bill O’Reilly again.  

 

This weekend marked the 87th edition of the Academy Awards, also known as the annual edition of celebrities and pundits whining about politicizing an event that celebrates politically-charged art (but only if the celebrity or pundit in question disagrees with what’s being said). In what was probably the highlight of the night (save for the most uncomfortable John Travolta moment since…well, last year), Common and John Legend won the Oscar for Best Original Song. Their acceptance speech was concise, clear, and honest, and made the rest of the night look like a mish-mash of poorly planned half-hearted theatrics.

O’Reilly makes the list here because of his and Fox News’ outrage at Common’s invitation to the White House in 2011. When First Lady Michelle Obama invited the rapper, whose legal name is Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., to a poetry event, the Right objected to his defense of convicted murderer Assata Shakur and objectionable lyrics throughout his work, particularly this slam poem, which includes the line “burn a Bush” in reference to the former president. On Sean Hannity’s show, Karl Rove described Lynn as a “thug” who “wanted to kill President Bush.” Don’t tell Rove that the words to songs and poems can be anything but literal accounts of desires and events – I can’t wait to see his reaction to Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.” Oh, and then there’s this, I guess.

But I digress. Here are a few rapidfire migraine-inducers.

 

 

Young, blonde, and in power? Must be a ditz.   

 

 

I’m trying so hard not to validate Godwin’s Law here. So, so hard.

I’d just like to highlight this line:

 

“You may further point out that many successful entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, also didn’t finish college because they had a whole lotta making money to do and college had become something akin to interference.”

First, I demand restitution for the stroke I had because of that sentence’s diction and grammar. Second, the first person on the list of “successful entrepreneurs” is Abraham Lincoln, who passed the bar exam, became an attorney, and openly mocked his father’s lack of education (notwithstanding the fact that there was no public education system during Lincoln’s youth, particularly not on the frontiers of Kentucky and Illinois). Third and far from finally, Bill Gates missed a single question on the SAT and left Harvard because it was too easy. Scott Walker bailed out of school over a year before graduation because he was more drawn to winning elections than maintaining his 2.59 GPA. There. Is. A. Difference.  

 

Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, menacing? Whatever. Let’s look at something a little less rage-inducing.

 

Look, maybe this state representative was having an off day, maybe he hadn’t had his coffee, maybe he was thinking about something else. But Chris Hayes is right: this is the best line in politics thus far this year.  

 

This Tweet comes courtesy of WUPR alum and Wall Street Journal writer Steven Perlberg. I honestly don’t know enough about the science of this article to comment on whether it’s valid, but it’s an exciting read in the same way that JFK was an exciting movie to watch (and not only because of Kevin Costner’s discoveries in how not to imitate a Southern accent). So we’re clear, that is not a bad thing. What’s great about this article is that it illustrates in one beautiful episode how cable news doesn’t just look like it’s being run by your average Johnny Depp character; sometimes, it is.

 

They say punditry is ruining the news, but cutting journalism like this is what keeps the papers afloat instead of sinking like a stone.

I’m here all semester, folks!

 

There is virtually no limit on what I would do to see Sean Penn have to give “American Sniper” the Academy Award for Best Picture. I can imagine it now — his face contorting, his ears steaming, his soul patch fleeing back to the 1960’s where it belongs, and finally the explosion, in which he reveals the jetpack hidden under his shameful excuse for a tuxedo that takes him back home to Papa Chavez’ palace. And, yes, dear reader, we’ve gotten to the point in the post where I’m so sure that nobody’s reading this that I feel comfortable writing about Sean Penn’s Hugo Chavez-seeking jetpack. So, I guess there’s that.

 

Lest this post grow too long, I’ll leave you with this, the pinnacle of cynicism, at least for this week.  Under a week removed from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ visit to campus, it seems the fetishization of his writing and person is only just starting to scrub out of the carpet in WUPR’s offices. It’s not that he’s not one of the best active writers in magazine journalism; it’s just that there’s such a thing as too much, and we found it, buried under hundreds of pages of The Atlantic and our self-respect.

Okay, okay, I couldn’t resist one more.

 

Never change, Hannity. Never change.

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2 Comments

Join the discussion and tell us your opinion.

Max Hreply
17 March 2015 at 12:54 PM

Just saying, I read that whole article and it was epic. Thanks for making my day.

Dewaynereply
22 March 2017 at 6:40 AM

It’s great that you are getting ideas from this post as well as
from our discussion made at this time.

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