Brian Williams and dirty lying liars who lie!

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

@ Muddguard

He claimed he saw a body floating passed the window of his French Quarter (it stayed dry) hotel room. And that he accidently swallowed dirty water and became gravely ill with dysentery.

[Swordfish]

I'm sure all those are just more examples of the fallibility of the human memory.

I'm going to start lying a lot more and blaming it on that. If you think about it, it can be extremely convenient.

[Suttree]

@ Muddguard

He claimed he saw a body floating passed the window of his French Quarter (it stayed dry)

Map of the flooding here. It's ok mate, memory is a tricky thing. Happens to the best of us.

I'm sure all those are just more examples of the fallibility of the human memory.

That's correct...if you're referring to A-MP.

[Larry of the Lawn]

@ Muddguard

He claimed he saw a body floating passed the window of his French Quarter (it stayed dry) hotel room. And that he accidently swallowed dirty water and became gravely ill with dysentery.

So he admitted he was full of shit?

[DanteGabriel]

@ Muddguard

He claimed he saw a body floating passed the window of his French Quarter (it stayed dry) hotel room. And that he accidently swallowed dirty water and became gravely ill with dysentery.

Here is an article from the time with photos of flooding outside the hotel (the Ritz Carlton) where Williams was staying.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

Here is an article from the time with photos of flooding outside the hotel (the Ritz Carlton) where Williams was staying.

I stand corrected.

[Shryke]

I have heard a number of interviews with researchers since this story broke, and I have to agree with Suttree, there are reams of research on how easy it is to misremember things. One research team even showed how easy it was to plant false memories into subjects - they made people remember they had committed a crime.

As one researcher said, memory is not a DVD player, where you push a button and the memory replays perfectly. A call-in show did a program on Williams and asked people to call in with stories of how memory screwed them up, and many people had stories about remembering exactly the opposite of what happened.

I didn't think this was a big deal in the first place, and now I have even more sympathy for Williams.

I once went out with someone who had what people call a photographic memory. He had an absolutely extraordinary memory, but he told me it was much diminished since his teen years. Eidectic memory, as it is called, is usually found in young children, and in more girls than boys. As for the rest of us, our memories are very unreliable.

What I find most interesting here is that no matter how many times you show this, you still see people like a few in this thread who just can't seem to deal with it.

"Sure there's tons of research demonstrating the fallibility and malleability of human memory, but what's that got to do with a story about a guy telling a story that turned out to be largely fabricated?"

I'm not sure how one even responds to such things.

[DireWolfSpirit]

I was going to post but I forgot

my story.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

What I find most interesting here is that no matter how many times you show this, you still see people like a few in this thread who just can't seem to deal with it.

"Sure there's tons of research demonstrating the fallibility and malleability of human memory, but what's that got to do with a story about a guy telling a story that turned out to be largely fabricated?"

I'm not sure how one even responds to such things.

There's a difference between "can't seem to deal with it" and "doesn't believe it's what happened in this case." You can accept the existence of a phenomenon without believing that it controls in all cases, because the reality is, it almost certainly does not control in all cases.

There's a lot of evidence, for example, about how false confessions are much easier to elicit than once previously thought. That does not, however, mean that all confessions are false. If you take any particular confession and are trying to judge whether it's true or not, simply pointing to the research that exists as to the manner in which false confessions can be elicited is surprisingly unhelpful, because it doesn't necessarily tell you what actually happened in the particular case being examined. Lots of confessions are true confessions.

To make any meaningful claim of truth about what actually happened in the Brian Williams case would require that we have far, far more evidence about Williams than we actually do. I do think it's kind of funny when someone seems to be trying to make an authoritative claim that Williams IS suffering from false memory on the basis of laboratory studies that bear little to no relationship to Williams' actual situation. For example, several of the studies repeatedly touted by people in this thread specifically involve the intentional inducement of false memories in adults about things that happened to them as children. They're here, here and here. Presumably, nobody was intentionally inducing false memories in Williams in a laboratory setting and he was definitely not a child when his helicopter wasn't grounded by a rocket propelled grenade.

Of course, does that mean that Williams ISN'T the victim of a false memory? Of course not. He very well might be. There's just not a whole hell of a lot of evidence either way. Probably the only relevant fact that I could find that might indicate one way or the other is that he initially told the story, on national television, the way it actually happened. That tends to suggest to me that any deviations in the story that have cropped up in the intervening years are not intentional attempts to mislead. But really, what the fuck do I know? Virtually nothing - as goes for everyone else here.

But people are going to have judgments, which come down, more or less, to simple beliefs based upon people's prejudices. And in that coin flip, some of us are going to land on heads, and some of us are going to land on tails - and I don't think there's a hell of a lot of reason to strongly prefer one option over the other.

[Shryke]

There's a difference between "can't seem to deal with it" and "doesn't believe it's what happened in this case." You can accept the existence of a phenomenon without believing that it controls in all cases, because the reality is, it almost certainly does not control in all cases.

There's a lot of evidence, for example, about how false confessions are much easier to elicit than once previously thought. That does not, however, mean that all confessions are false. If you take any particular confession and are trying to judge whether it's true or not, simply pointing to the research that exists as to the manner in which false confessions can be elicited is surprisingly unhelpful, because it doesn't necessarily tell you what actually happened in the particular case being examined. Lots of confessions are true confessions.

To make any meaningful claim of truth about what actually happened in the Brian Williams case would require that we have far, far more evidence about Williams than we actually do. I do think it's kind of funny when someone seems to be trying to make an authoritative claim that Williams IS suffering from false memory on the basis of laboratory studies that bear little to no relationship to Williams' actual situation. For example, several of the studies repeatedly touted by people in this thread specifically involve the intentional inducement of false memories in adults about things that happened to them as children. They're here, here and here. Presumably, nobody was intentionally inducing false memories in Williams in a laboratory setting and he was definitely not a child when his helicopter wasn't grounded by a rocket propelled grenade.

Of course, does that mean that Williams ISN'T the victim of a false memory? Of course not. He very well might be. There's just not a whole hell of a lot of evidence either way. Probably the only relevant fact that I could find that might indicate one way or the other is that he initially told the story, on national television, the way it actually happened. That tends to suggest to me that any deviations in the story that have cropped up in the intervening years are not intentional attempts to mislead. But really, what the fuck do I know? Virtually nothing - as goes for everyone else here.

But people are going to have judgments, which come down, more or less, to simple beliefs based upon people's prejudices. And in that coin flip, some of us are going to land on heads, and some of us are going to land on tails - and I don't think there's a hell of a lot of reason to strongly prefer one option over the other.

Given the way his story changes over time, it seems fairly obvious that it's a combination of exaggerating and misremembering.

This should not be an unknown phenomenon to anyone who's ever told a story or had one told to them.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Given the way his story changes over time, it seems fairly obvious that it's a combination of exaggerating and misremembering.

This should not be an unknown phenomenon to anyone who's ever told a story or had one told to them.

So... it's "fairly obvious" that he's splitting the difference between intentionally lying and unintentionally misstating the truth?

I guess we solved it.

Can you clear up for me which part he intentionally lied about and which part he unintentionally misstated as true?

And also, the source of your knowledge, which I assume is somewhere up your sphincter.

[Suttree]

I do think it's kind of funny when someone seems to be trying to make an authoritative claim that Williams IS suffering from false memory on the basis of laboratory studies that bear little to no relationship to Williams' actual situation.

1. Can you please link where anyone has done what you describe above in terms of an "authoritative claim"?

2. Yes we all get that there are studies that differ in nature. That said claiming they all bear little to no relationship on this situation is a best uninformed and at worst flat out disingenuous.

[Shryke]

1) We know this kind of thing is a real phenomenon, so when someone like Swordfish says:

But you don't 'misremember' getting shot down in a helicopter.

He is doing exactly what you are not accepting that people are doing.

2) The fact that his story starts off apparently accurately and then slowly changes over time and his claims on the subject do seem to indicate some level of misremembering. The other alternative of his intentionally lying this whole time makes no sense except within the framework of a personality that does not match anything we know about the guy.

[Relic]

A - Who gives shit?

B - He obviously lied. "Misremembering" had nothing to do with it. I "misremember" where i left my keys, not that the chopper i was in almost got hit by a missile. That sort of shit tends to stick in your memory banks.

C - Who gives a shit?

[Suttree]

A - Who gives shit?

C - Who gives a shit?

Pretty much. I've said it before but of all the things we should be upset about in terms of how our press handled it's coverage of this war, a celebrity making some inane embellishment doesn't even register.

[Shryke]

B - He obviously lied. "Misremembering" had nothing to do with it. I "misremember" where i left my keys, not that the chopper i was in almost got hit by a missile. That sort of shit tends to stick in your memory banks.

Does it?

This is exactly the kind of shit I'm talking about again. No matter how many times you say it, people just can't deal with it. They refuse to accept the idea.

[Relic]

Ok, even if there is a shred of possibility that he just "forgot the actual facts" let's just say any journalist inflicted with fatal "misremembering" shouldn't be a journalist.

This "story" pisses me off so god damned much. Bush and Cheney kept their jobs but this sad sack of make-up lost his over a silly lie. Infuriating.

[Shryke]

Ok, even if there is a shred of possibility that he just "forgot the actual facts" let's just say any journalist inflicted with fatal "misremembering" shouldn't be a journalist.

This "story" pisses me off so god damned much. Bush and Cheney kept their jobs but this sad sack of make-up lost his over a silly lie. Infuriating.

It is indeed ridiculous. I don't understand how anyone could actually get worked up over this when the media has promulgated lies that actually matter and like, got hundreds of thousands killed. You know, for example.

[Suttree]

More on the Bill O'Reilly story. Fairly interesting to watch the different lines being taken by the two networks.

The central dispute is whether Mr. O’Reilly reported from active war zones, as he has repeatedly said on the air and in his 2001 book, “The No Spin Zone: Confrontations With the Powerful and Famous in America.”

Mr. O’Reilly has said that he had never claimed he reported from the Falkland Islands, where the fighting occurred. “I said I covered the Falklands war, which I did,” he said last Friday. He went on to describe his coverage of protests in the aftermath of the war on the streets of Buenos Aires, some 1,200 miles from the Falklands...

Former CBS News staff members said on Monday that Mr. O’Reilly’s account of his reporting on the protests in Argentina was flawed. Eric Engberg, a correspondent for CBS News for 27 years, reported on the same riot near the presidential palace in Buenos Aires in June 1982 as Mr. O’Reilly. He said in an interview that several CBS News camera crews were sent out to cover the angry crowds, who had heard that Argentina surrendered the disputed Falkland Islands to Britain. Though the crowd was unruly, Mr. Engberg said, the rest of the CBS News crew, which included veterans of war zones, thought “it was the chummiest riot anyone had ever covered.”...

Mr. Engberg, the former CBS News correspondent, also strongly disputed Mr. O’Reilly’s claim that he had rescued an injured cameraman while being chased by the Argentine army. “Nobody reported a cameraman being shot or injured,” he said. His account was supported by a senior member of the CBS News management team, with close knowledge of the events that night, who said that nobody was reported injured, and no request for medical attention was made to CBS News’s local medical team.

Another CBS News correspondent on the ground, Charles Gomez, said in an interview that though he likes Mr. O’Reilly and was surprised by the accusations, his memories matched those of his former colleagues.

“I do remember that there was tension between the authorities and the crowd,” he said, but added that he “did not see any bloodshed.” No cameraman was injured, he said, to the best of his recollection. Mr. Gomez, who covered wars in Nicaragua and other conflict zones, said he would not describe the events that night as war.

[zelticgar]

Not sure what to make of the O'Reilly situation but at least he is out there talking about it and challenging some of the people making assertions. One of the things that hurt Williams is he never directly communicated with anyone other than his own statements (which were terrible BTW).

VA Chief, Robert McDonald got caught as a dirty lying liar who lies this week as well. Apparently he claimed special forces creds when he never actually served. I guess he went through Ranger training but served in 82nd Airborne. Still seems pretty bad ass to me so I've decided to let him keep his job. And CNN are douches for comparing this to the CT governors claim of serving in Vietnam. The two cases are not even in the same universe.