In 2015, network news anchors are not the towering cultural figures they were in the days when there were only three channels and a majority of American households tuned in to watch the likes of Walter Cronkite every night. Nevertheless, anchoring the nightly news may still be the highest-profile job in American journalism, so when someone like Brian Williams gets in trouble, it's a significant story. And Williams is in fairly big trouble today.
I don't think this is going to end his career, both because of the nature of the offense and because of Williams's image. He may not be worshipped, but his persona is that of a serious yet friendly guy, who's even a little goofy at times (see his self-deprecating cameos on 30 Rock). There isn't some large group of people that despises Williams and is eager to take him down, as there was with Dan Rather. But how does something like this happen? To catch you up, here's the story that Stars and Stripes broke:
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.
Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC's coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.
The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment's Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.
"I would not have chosen to make this mistake," Williams said. "I don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another."
Williams told his Nightly News audience that the erroneous claim was part of a "bungled attempt" to thank soldiers who helped protect him in Iraq in 2003. "I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago," Williams said. "I want to apologize."
That story has a timeline of Williams' statements, and it appears that he made the false claim twice: in a 2013 appearance on David Letterman's show, and this past Friday. So how should we interpret this? Was it an honest mistake? An intentional lie? Is Williams a fraud?
In thinking about it, I was reminded of a story George W. Bush once told about September 11. You'll recall that when the second plane hit, Bush was informed while visiting a classroom in Florida. He later described his reaction to the first plane hitting: "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower-the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident." This could not possibly have been true, because the impact of the first plane hitting was not broadcast on television that day (some video did emerge, but not until later). In my less charitable days I characterized this as simply a lie, but was it? Chances are that Bush was just mixing up things in his mind, essentially rewriting his memory with the things he saw and thought later on.
Which we all do constantly. Memory isn't a static file of information that can be opened later and perused. It's subject to constant revision. Which is why we've come to understand that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. For instance, when police show a witness a picture of a suspect and the witness decides that guy was the one he saw, he'll often essentially overwrite his own memory of the event with that person's face inserted in. His belief in the newly revised memory will be absolutely sincere. (For more on this, here's an article by Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker on the subject, and here's a great episode of Radiolab on how unreliable our memories are.)
But you might object that this isn't like forgetting whether you saw a particular piece of footage as it was happening or you saw it a few days later. Being in a helicopter that got hit by an RPG and being in a helicopter following one that got hit by an RPG are very different things. On the other hand, for someone who isn't himself a soldier, the whole episode was probably crazy and exciting and a little traumatic-flying through the desert, making an emergency landing, seeing the damaged helicopter, having to stay at the FOB through a sandstorm, fearful that they might be attacked. And so it isn't all that shocking to find that years later as he's recounting the story, Williams mixed up the details in a way that had everything happening not just near him but to him.
Obviously, the way you judge this is going to be colored by what you thought of Brian Williams before. Do you think he's the kind of person who would willfully fabricate something like this in the belief that he'd never get caught? More to the point, would I be giving him the benefit of the doubt if he were Sean Hannity? I hope so, but until it happens I can't say with absolute certainty. But the fact that most Americans think Brian Williams seems like a perfectly nice fellow-and, of course, the fact that he's an extremely valuable property for his employer-is probably what will enable him to get past this with little damage to his career. Unless somebody finds another embellished tale or two that he's told, in which case it could become a real problem.