Thread by @shobz

There have been big names in Journalism in the West who suffered the consequences of unsubstantiated news reports. [Thread]

Dan Rather was a national name in the US and anchored CBS Evening News for 24 years, as well as a stint as a correspondent on 60 Minutes II.

He came under heavy criticism due to the Killian documents controversy (2004), which were unsubstantiated allegations against George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_d…

The issue was that the network did not authenticate those documents and let the segment air. Both CBS and Rather continued to defend the documents for two weeks, till they admitted they were wrong.
nbcnews.com/id/wbna6055248

Executives and Senior Producers were fired for that, while Rather was let go before his contract renewal the following year.
baltimoresun.com/entertainment/…

Piers Morgan was another big name who lost his job at the Daily Mirror in 2004, where he had been around for 8.5 years.

The Daily Mirror had published pictures of British Soldiers allegedly torturing Iraqi prisoners. This came in the wake of the horrific Abu Ghraib scandal. However, the pictures were soon found out to be fake and the paper had to apologize. nytimes.com/2004/05/13/int…

Piers refused to apologize to the head of the paper for publishing the pictures or admitting they were faked. His stance was that it was similar to the type of abuse which was occurring in Iraq at that time. It ended with him being sacked. theguardian.com/media/2004/may…

In an interview with Politico years later, Piers said
"To this day, nobody has ever produced hard evidence to me that they were fake photographs."

"I was fired. I refuse to apologize. And I refuse to accept that they were necessarily fakes. To this day, nobody has ever been prosecuted for it. They never found out who took the pictures."

politico.com/blogs/media/20…

Pier was right to allude to a sort of coverup. The ICC closed its preliminary examination of war crimes by UK forces in Iraq. It revealed systematic failures of international justice and proves, once again, that powerful actors can get away with torture. ecchr.eu/en/case/war-cr…

The court did not take any action even though there was evidence that British Troops were responsible for war crimes in Iraq. icc-cpi.int/itemsDocuments… bbc.com/news/uk-552470…

Brian Williams was chief Anchor at NBC Nightly News from 2004 till 2015. He was one of the biggest stars at the network until he made up a story about his Iraq War "experience".

Back in 2003, Williams told Tom Brokaw about how he was on a Chinook helicopter that drew fire during the Iraq Invasion. He had repeated this claims over the years.

When he made those claims again in 2015, and was caught out when soldiers who were actually in those Chinooks called him out on Social Media for lying. It turned out that he was on another chopper which wasn't affected.
latimes.com/entertainment/…

This led to him being suspended for six months for lying about the events. He was also demoted and ended up on MSNBC later.

I should add that it's not a coincidence that nearly all of these incidents are all related to the military in some form. It also seems that not everything in the West is free.