Reacting to the news on Tuesday that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams had been suspended for six months indefinitely without pay, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell joined Sean Hannity on his Fox News Channel (FNC) show and described the decision as “very strange” considering how the lies Williams told are “not going to go away.”
Appearing with Hot Air’s Noah Rothman and investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, Bozell led off the segment by observing how “the statements made by the NBC executives” only reference the false statements Williams had made about being shot down over Iraq in 2003 and not questions about his reporting during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel.
With that being the case, Bozell told Hannity how “[t]his whole six-month thing is very strange, Sean. You can't say, on the one hand, we will not stand for this a front at our credibility, our credibility is the most important thing to us, but in six months, it’s okay.”
Further, he reiterated the point that NBC’s decision was “very unfortunate” where “[e]ven people defending him tonight seem to feel that it's distasteful” and thus NBC should have decided to “either keep him or let him go, but this six-month blood letting, it's just going to be awful.”
>> All of NewsBusters‘ coverage of the Brian Williams scandal <<
Bozell continued:
It's going to be ugly. There will be lawsuits as your last guest said, there’s going to be recriminations. This thing is not going to go away and if he comes back, it will be NBC, comma, the network whose chief newscast has been caught lying while reporting news.
The nearly seven-minute-long segment later shifted gears to comparing Williams’s lies to those of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign when she claimed to have been shot at while on an airport tarmac during a 1996 trip to Bosnia.
When Hannity asked Bozell if he thought that Hillary’s lie will receive “new scrutiny based on the Brian Williams story,” Bozell responded that it indeed will and that it is “a good thing” for everyone:
Sure, it does. Because, as she said it once, we could all agree that sometimes when you're sleep deprived, you will say something, especially when someone speaks as often as Secretary Clinton does. However, she repeated this story over and over. So yes, this will become part of a conversation. By the way, this is a good thing. It's a good thing we start having a serious conversation about our leaders across the board, and the things that they misrepresent.
Prior to his appearance on Hannity, Bozell released a statement on the suspension of Williams, which can be found here.
