Ah Yes, He Remembers it Well

Gosh, why would I mistrust the mainstream media?

Brian Williams said that over time he conflated an incident that happened to another helicopter crew to with his own uneventful helicopter ride.

I sympathize. Years ago (Who am I kidding? Decades ago) I used to think I was just a REMF signal corps guy. Over the years I began to confuse my past with others and started to claim I was a Delta Force operator who ate snakes and fought may way out of Mogadishu when the skinnies swarmed us.

Oh wait. I've never confused those two separate things.

Sadly, those layers of fact checkers weren't between Brian Williams and the public.

Instapundit notes this smug defense of his profession that doesn't actually defend his profession as much as it attacks the questioner and reveals his inability to see his own bias.

This was uploaded in June 2007. I don't know if this means the event was in that month. But by then we were seeing signs that the Awakening-enabled surge was working.

The question posed to Williams wasn't that the media was failing to paint a picture of a Vermont-like Iraq. The question was that by focusing on the daily violence and explosions, the media was falsely portraying a war we were losing.

But to be fair, their comrades in the government were doing the same thing.

We were winning the war despite the vicious nature of our enemies who killed civilians as a strategy and for their own glory.

And before the surge I judged we had overcome many enemies and could defeat the latest enemy surge of bloody violence.

But instead of answering that question, Williams gave a "my profession is dying out there (like he risked, which the helicopter faux incident proves!) to provide coverage" response. As if war supporters were arguing that Iraq was peaceful rather than that we were and could (and should) win the war.

Even if it is an earlier video of Williams and does not include ignoring the first impact of the surge, we did win that war, so the validity of the criticism in that question to Williams is obvious.

And the inability of Williams to even recognize there was a valid question makes it obvious why I don't trust these people to report accurately--especially on war issues.