It's the Little Lies That Torpedo the News Stars - As Brian Williams Has Found to His Cost Last Week
Embellishment and bravado are often punished more harshly than the untruths that cause wars
BY PATRICK COCKBURN
The exposure of fake or exaggerated tales of journalistic derring-do by Brian Williams, the anchor of NBC Nightly News now suspended without pay, will ignite a small glow of satisfaction in the breasts of many foreign correspondents. The arrival of anchors, editors or “celebrity” correspondents in the middle of a crisis, war, or at any other time, has always been the bane of reporters on the ground. I remember a friend on Time magazine, in the days when it was a power in the land 40 years ago, vainly trying to explain to his bosses why he was having difficulty arranging their fact-finding tour of Kuwait in the middle of Ramadan.
Williams’s credibility first began to disintegrate when he was challenged on his claim that he had been in a Chinook helicopter that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in the Iraq War of 2003. In fact, the missile hit a Chinook flying half an hour ahead of his own. But he wasn’t the only journalist to be carried away by the idea that his life was in imminent danger at that time. I was then in Irbil, the Kurdish capital, and used to enjoy visiting a hotel called, so far as I recall, the Irbil Tower. Fox News was based on an upper floor of the hotel, the entrance to which, opposite the lift, was protected by a sandbag emplacement though not a shot was fired in Irbil during the conflict. In fact, the Fox team really was in some danger – a nervous receptionist at the front desk told me – because the weight of the sandbags was such that it might lead to the collapse of the shoddily built hotel.
Journalists very seldom lie about their war exploits, because, among other reasons, they are likely to be exposed by their colleagues. Usually, there is no reason to lie because almost any story can be given an appearance of truthfulness by judicious selection of the facts. My father, Claud Cockburn, an author and journalist, got into trouble for attacking what he called “the heresy of the facts”, making the point that there are not a finite number of facts lying around like nuggets of gold ore in the Yukon until they are picked up by some journalistic prospector. He argued that, on the contrary, there are an infinite number of facts and it is the judgement of the journalist that decides which are significant or insignificant. He explained that, in a sense, all stories are written backwards, beginning with the writer’s “take” on what matters and only then proceeding to a search for facts that he or she judges to be important. All this seemed to my father to be a matter of common sense, and he was taken aback to be criticised for confusing decent truth-loving reporters with black-hearted propagandists who make up stories.
Of course, some stories are faked, such as the one in 1990 about babies in a Kuwait hospital being tipped out of incubators by invading Iraqi soldiers and left to die on the floor. But a good propagandist or even a journalist looking for a good story does not have to fabricate; a selective approach to the facts is all that is needed. I remember going to Libya in the early 1990s when there was some prospect of a US invasion. Absolutely nothing was happening and the scores of journalists who had arrived on the same mission as myself waited impatiently until they could go home.
Full article:
http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/its-the-little-lies-that-torpedo-the-news-stars-as-brian-williams-has-found-to-his-cost-last-week/
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