For years, anchor Brian Williams has been regaling not just family and friends, but viewers of his top-rated NBC Nightly News over the years with brazen brazen lies about derring-dos throughout his career. They often centered on life-and-death adventures he “experienced” reporting everywhere from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to Iraq during the Gulf War.
Scrambling to contain a crisis engulfing one of its most prominent on-air personalities, NBC will begin an internal investigation into Brian Williams, the embattled evening news anchor who has admitted he misled the public with a harrowing tale of a forced helicopter landing in Iraq…
‘Brian apologized once again, and specifically expressed how sorry he is for the impact this has had on all of you and on this proud organization,’ [Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News] said.
(New York Times, February 6, 2015)
This investigation does not bode well for Williams, especially given reports that it will scrutinize, for evidence of dissembling, every report he has ever filed and every boast he has ever made. Investigators are bound to find more than enough to make keeping him in the anchor chair untenable for NBC … journalistically. And mocking references on social media, which will ensure his tall tales live on in infamy, are bound to undermine any attempt to whitewash the results.
Granted, telling lies about his professional adventures does not mean that Williams can’t read the news, which reliable reporters gather and producers script for him to read from a teleprompter. But who wants to be informed about anything by an anchor who has been outed as a serial liar…?
Except that Williams is probably the most honest news anchor, and NBC the most reliable news network, in broadcast journalism.
My disdain for what passes for journalism these days is well documented. And CBS’s 60 Minutes, the reputed standard bearer of broadcast journalism, only reinforced my disdain on Sunday when public outrage forced it to issue a pathetic apology for reporting one man’s delusions of grandeur as facts.
(“Journalism is ‘Having a Very, Very Pathetic Moment,’” The iPINIONS Journal, November 13, 2013)
So, a plague on all broadcast networks…?
One could be forgiven for decreeing as much; not least because network news now amounts to little more than repackaging stories already trending on social networks. Indeed, it is as ironic as it is telling that Twitter was all atwitter about Brian’s whoppers long before they became breaking news in the mainstream media, triggering a crisis at NBC.
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* Cartoon courtesy of David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Star