What possesses people to lie like this? Do they think no one will out them? Do they think they are above everything else? It baffles the mind. Also can he be trusted to report the news going forward?
NBC ‘‘Nightly News’’ anchor Brian Williams apologized Wednesday for incorrectly claiming as recently as last week that he rode on a helicopter that came under enemy fire when he was reporting in Iraq in 2003.
I have a feeling his public career is about to be over.
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hawkeye10
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Sat 7 Feb, 2015 12:06 am
@Linkat,
To gain cred with the troops he covers, to get a good bar story. I have a big problem with how these massively over paid news readers have had their hand in the destruction of journalism. but this controversy is all about nothing.
Quote:
Also can he be trusted to report the news going forward?
have you looked at the news lately? you trusted brian williams to tell the truth till now? So far as I know he is part of the washington crowd that schmoozes for access, I did not trust him to tell the truth before now.
Well she is a politician - she is supposed to lie. Journalists are supposed to report facts.
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wandeljw
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Sat 7 Feb, 2015 08:15 am
Neurologists that study memory state that all of us are capable of distorting a memory over time so that inaccurate details become attached to the memory. Eventually we are convinced that inaccurate or conflated details were a true part of the event we are trying to remember. This may not be dishonesty.
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engineer
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Sat 7 Feb, 2015 09:02 am
@Linkat,
Linkat wrote:
But this was huge item. You really cannot mis-remember being shot down.
As I read the story, Williams was riding with a group of helicopters, one of which was hit with an RPG. There is some dispute over whether there was small arms fire as well. All of the helicopters went to ground including the one with Williams. No excuse for Williams, but people rewrite their memories over time. My mother has told me with great sincerity that she remembers when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She was not born yet. My father and I remember events significantly differently. Williams was in a convoy that came under fire. He was sitting in the back, probably running scared with limited access to what was really happening. If his memory doesn't quite match reality I'm not really bent about it.
Frank, I claim no war stories that didn't happen. While I've never been in a helo that was shot at I am certain I wouldn't misremember that. This kind of incident makes some folks feel like their experience is being trivialized. And I understand that. In the scheme of things it doesn't make for any piles of beans but we tend to want the ideal (illusion?) that professional witnesses speak of actual events they were part of even if on the periphery of the event. He could have authoritatively spoken of the stress of going into a zone hot enough to have drawn an RPG attack on a previous helicopter landing less than an hour earlier. But putting himself into a helo under attack without mentioning he really wasn't there is unethical.
He's in the back, everyone is yelling "take cover" and "incoming hostile fire" (I don't know that, just imagining) and then they land and someone tells him "we were taking fire and Jim's helo went down". I doubt he ever really knew what happened. Of course he is a reporter and should have dug out the story, but such is life.
He is being accused of fabricating a story, which it appears that he did. I expect to see more of the zero tolerance for being human that we Americans so often engage in, lots of people are looking into his stories, and with as much as he has talked over the years there are almost certainly more "gotcha's" to come. I expect that he will be fired.
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.
The “fact-checking” inquiry, confirmed on Friday by several people in the network’s news division, will review not only the Iraq incident but also Mr. Williams’s reporting during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as well as any other issues that arise during the investigation.
Richard Esposito, the head of NBC’s investigative unit, will lead the inquiry. Mr. Esposito does not report to Mr. Williams, who holds the positions of both anchor and managing editor for “NBC Nightly News.”
In a staff memo on Friday, Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News, said that the network had “a team dedicated to gathering the facts to help us make sense of all that has transpired.”
Ms. Turness said that she and Mr. Williams had spoken with the “Nightly News” team on Thursday and addressed more employees in an editorial meeting on Friday.
Media outlets need to make up their minds..... they order their talent to go on social media and talk shows in an attempt to connect with the audience, to go well outside of "just the facts ma'am" in the attempt to get people to like them , then they get all upset when their talent behaves as humans do.
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hawkeye10
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Sat 7 Feb, 2015 12:05 pm
@Butrflynet,
Anyone who does not like the guy will be calling up NBC with probable "gotcha's"....unless Williams is normally a choirboy he is toast.
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Frank Apisa
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Sat 7 Feb, 2015 12:16 pm
At very least...Williams will be pilloried by people who have done the same kind of thing in their bleak, common lives that Williams did in his very visible position.
Williams did wrong...serious wrong.
Much of the indignation over what he did, however, is hypocrisy in action.
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