NBC News talker Brian Williams has provided plenty of fodder for criticism and jokes over the past couple of years but I’m not sure if this is really a failure on his part. After I went to bed on Thursday night and the Tomahawks began raining down in Syria, Williams was on the air at MSNBC providing some color (or colorful) coverage of the unfolding events. He seems to have ticked off some folks in the peanut gallery however when he waxed poetic on the missile launches from our warships.
Brian Williams is facing online criticism for waxing poetic about what he called “beautiful pictures” of U.S. missiles launching during an attack on a Syrian air base.
Video released by the military shows Tomahawk missiles targeted for a Syrian airfield launching from the decks of U.S. warships in the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday.
During his MSNBC program, “The 11th Hour,” late Thursday night, Williams said the “beautiful pictures at night” tempted him to quote a line from a Leonard Cohen song: “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.” He went on to call the images “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.”
As media fails go, this one doesn’t even move the needle as far as I’m concerned. What precisely were people finding so offensive about that? Having spent a fair amount of time sailing around on our warships myself, I’ve seen some of these missile launches first hand. Remembering that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a significant show of force at sea such as this truly is beautiful and a real sight to behold. That’s why the military and the media work together to release such images. Nothing wrong with this whatsoever.
wpDiscuz