Brian Williams For Chrysler

Not surprisingly, Nightly News continues to do its part to promote Chrysler. Monday's final "news story" was nothing more than a 3:15 commercial for the auto company. It included 80 seconds of clips from their Super Bowl ad, while the rest of the story consisted of Anne Thompson and others acting like Chrysler cheerleaders. It's not hard to figure out who was behind this story. Brian Williams has been using his broadcast to promote Chrysler for years. Many Nightly News viewers still remember the infamous 11/13/07 broadcast, which Brian anchored from inside a Chrysler plant in Detroit. That broadcast was a non-stop thirty-minute rah-rah commercial for Chrysler which ended with Brian and Chrysler exec Jim Press falling all over each other to see who can say the nicest things about Chrysler (Brian may have actually won that contest). From the way Brian relentlessly promotes Chrysler, you'd think he owns stock in the company. But that couldn't be the case, since Brian always fully discloses any conflicts of interest that exist between him and his sponsors. Yeah, right. And if you believe that, there's a bridge across the East River that I'd like to sell you. Obviously, this "news story" was a gift from NBC to their pals at Chrysler, but I'm just wondering: How much cash would Chrysler have had to shell out for a 3:15 commercial on Nightly News if they had actually paid for it?

Once again, the Nightly News producers have attempted to deceive the viewers by altering a photographic image for their own convenience. On Jan. 25, the producers flipped an image of Jeff Bridges from "True Grit" because they wanted Bridges to appear as if he was looking at a picture of Jesse Eisenberg (the flipped image was obvious because Bridges's eye patch had mysteriously moved from his right eye to his left eye). And on last Friday's broadcast, they did it again. As Brian introduced a story about the Super Bowl, there was a photo above his left shoulder of a Packers helmet facing a Steelers helmet. But there was one problem. The Steelers helmet clearly showed the team's logo on the left side. even a casual football fan knows that the Steelers logo appears only on the right side of their helmet. So that means that the Nightly News producers flipped the image or otherwise altered it by superimposing the logo on the left side. Is anyone at Nightly News paying attention? Did they think that no one would notice? How many other times have they done this? And why do they continually choose to flip images that are so easily detectable? That's not exactly a smart thing to do. If they had flipped the Packers helmet, nobody would have noticed because their logo appears on both sides of the helmet. But there's a larger issue here. Don't the Nightly News producers understand that flipping or altering an image is completely inappropriate for a news broadcast? They are required to show us images as they actually exist, not as the producers want them to appear. This is unethical behavior. What's next? An image of Pres. Obama signing a bill with his right hand?