@hawkeye10,
Gawker is reporting that the Thursday Letterman spot has been Cancelled by Williams. Whether this is at COMCAST demand or not is not is not known.
@hawkeye10,
Supporting my view that Willaims was motivated by a desire to please his audience, that he wanted to tell a great story and to do so he fudged the facts'
Quote:Williams’ insistence on playing for laughs—and his talent at garnering them—points to the compulsive desire to please often seen in the behaviors of salesmen, teachers, confidence men and political candidates. As long as the comedian has the crowd chuckling, he can sell them something, teach them something, pick their pocket or otherwise bamboozle them. The comic arts should not be banned from journalism—god forbid that should happen! But journalists who work overtime on entertaining you or making you laugh deserve your suspicion. In journalism, the story is supposed to be king. That doesn’t mean the cleverness or emotive writing has no place, only that the narrow bandwidth comedy offers can carry only so much journalistic information.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/brian-williamss-jack-shafer-114974.html#ixzz3RCz0B2LH
Over the last day I have become convinced that Williams is done, that there is no way to come back from this. The truth is the point, not the grandness of the story. A journalist who forgets this is toast.
@hawkeye10,
I further submit that Willaims is in retreat (cancelling Letterman, apologizing, leaving the anchor chair) because he has long been aware of how he was pushing the envelope, he knew that he was sacrificing truth for the story and he also knows that now that the dogs are on him they will find much in the tapes to rip him apart with. He also knows that there is no chance that Comcast will support him once they see how many different versions of stories he has told.
@hawkeye10,
Quote:The perceptions of the weak, confused apology, and suspending himself for as long as he chooses, are not good for Mr. Williams or his employer. A full-throated, unmodulated apology is the only thing that will satisfy a public who placed their trust in him. And his voluntary step back, however well intended, suggests he is answerable only to himself. Indeed, the investigation at NBC will be led internally, by the head of investigations, who depends on Mr. Williams to make room for his work on the newscast.
Deborah Turness, the embattled head of the news division, needed to demonstrate that someone was in charge of Mr. Williams and his fate. The American public won’t abide someone putting himself into the naughty corner and setting the conditions for staying there.
Beyond those strategic failures, if you are going tell a war story that sprints past the truth, it best not be about war. Those of us who worked the Hurricane Katrina coverage rolled our eyes at some of the stories Mr. Williams told of the mayhem there, but it was a dark, confusing place and a lot of bad stuff happened, so who were we to judge? But armed service and its perils are seen as sacred and must not be trifled with. The soldiers who ended up in harm’s way and survived that day are calling him out because their moral code requires it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/business/media/brian-williams-and-memories-retread-from-a-perch-too-public.html?_r=0
Turness was already on thin ice, the failure of leadership on the Williams crisis will likely mean that she is done as well. Only 1.5 years into the gig she has made a complete hash of things.
Another side of this story, a big part of the downfall of Williams, is indeed that he treaded on our "heros" (the military men and women) by reaching to put himself falsely on par with them. For backstory read "THe tragedy of the American Military" in the Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/
The military is now very separate from the majority American culture, and the majority puts the military on a pedestal. When American Heros are offended we jump to their defense, we are offended in sympathy. Williams has made it very clear how ashamed he is that he made up stories that came close to putting him on par with the Hero's when he is just a journalist who was covering them, but beyond that he has to be aware enough about this collective to know that this sin will not be forgiven by the majority of the people. The Journalists of WW2 could get away with making up some bits of personal derring-do to make their war stories better, but todays journalists can not, it will not be accepted by the audience. Williams acts like he knows this.
Quote:Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.
The difference between the earlier America that knew its military and the modern America that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply in changes in popular and media culture. While World War II was under way, its best-known chroniclers were the Scripps Howard reporter Ernie Pyle, who described the daily braveries and travails of the troops (until he was killed near the war’s end by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Iejima), and the Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who mocked the obtuseness of generals and their distance from the foxhole realities faced by his wisecracking GI characters, Willie and Joe.
From Mister Roberts to South Pacific to Catch-22, from The Caine Mutiny to The Naked and the Dead to From Here to Eternity, American popular and high culture treated our last mass-mobilization war as an effort deserving deep respect and pride, but not above criticism and lampooning. The collective achievement of the military was heroic, but its members and leaders were still real people, with all the foibles of real life. A decade after that war ended, the most popular military-themed TV program was The Phil Silvers Show, about a con man in uniform named Sgt. Bilko. As Bilko, Phil Silvers was that stock American sitcom figure, the lovable blowhard—a role familiar from the time of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners to Homer Simpson in The Simpsons today. Gomer Pyle, USMC; Hogan’s Heroes; McHale’s Navy; and even the anachronistic frontier show F Troop were sitcoms whose settings were U.S. military units and whose villains—and schemers, and stooges, and occasional idealists—were people in uniform. American culture was sufficiently at ease with the military to make fun of it, a stance now hard to imagine outside the military itself.
Brian Williams May Have Exaggerated Another Helicopter Story
By Margaret Hartmann Follow @marghartmann
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Brian Williams reports from Israel in 2006.
While looking into Brian Williams's questionable account of a 2003 helicopter ride in Iraq, the media stumbled onto another airborne adventure that seems to have grown in the telling. On Saturday, Ace of Spades highlighted a 2007 interview with a student at Fairfield University in which the NBC Nightly News anchor recalls that during the Iraq incident he "looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us and it hit the chopper in front of ours." In the same breath, Williams mentions that during Israel's war with Hezbollah in 2006, "there were Katyushka rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in." But in the actual footage, and Williams's earlier descriptions, it appears that the rockets were nowhere near his helicopter.
Williams frames the story, at the two-minute mark in the video below, as an incident he barely survived:
I've been very, very lucky the way my life has turned out. I've been very lucky to have survived a few things that I've been involved in. At a reception a few minutes ago, I was remembering something I tend to forget, the war with Hezbollah in Israel, a few years back, where there were Katyusha rockets passing just underneath the helicopter I was riding in. A few years before that you go back to Iraq and I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us and it hit the chopper in front of ours. And I'm so fortunate to be sitting here.
But in footage of the flight shown in a July 2006 Nightly News report, Williams doesn't appear to be in serious danger. He says his crew is flying in "a Black Hawk helicopter at 1,500 feet" with a high-ranking Israeli general, and learns from air-traffic chatter that there is "activity on the ground right below us." (There's a quote from the pilot in the accompanying blog post: "They're having some shelling right now," the pilot says. "They landed about 30 seconds ago.")
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While surveying the Katyusha rockets, which landed in the uninhabited countryside, Williams notices a fresh launch trail. "From a distance of six miles, I witnessed a rocket launch, a rising trail of smoke, then a second launch, an orange flash and more smoke as a rocket heads off toward towards Israel," he says.
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Williams recounted the incident in several interviews in the weeks following it. Here's what he said in a July 19, 2006, appearance on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:
What a bizarre sight and feeling, Keith. You're at an altitude of 1,500 feet above the deck. And when you think of the fact that these missiles are landing and rolling and exploding and causing fires exactly 1,500 feet below you, and that some of them are made to go further, simple math would tell you, perhaps there are safer helicopter rides to go on.
It was a fascinating view of this war, of what has happened, of the damage they've done. The railroad depot, the coverage of that strike, I happened to be watching while packing for this trip. And the notion of the jet age is just strange enough, and the places we go for a living, strange enough. You never think that just days later, you will be doing a tight circle looking out the gunner`s door down onto the hole made in the roof by that Katyusha rocket.
And this is how the incident was described in a Hollywood Reporter story on reporters covering the war:
On a mission with Israeli generals in a Blackhawk chopper over northern Israel, Williams saw Katyusha rockets launch and stream white smoke past him before exploding on a hillside. "They lack the accuracy to hit the chopper we were in, but it was quite a vantage point," Williams said after he landed Tuesday.
As the Washington Post notes, the story became more dramatic by August, when Williams appeared on the Daily Show. "Here’s a view of rockets I have never seen, passing underneath us, 1,500 feet beneath us," the anchor says. "And we’ve got the gunner doors on this thing, and I’m saying to the general, some four-star: 'It wouldn’t take much for them to adjust the aim and try to do a ring toss right through our open doors, would it?'" He concludes by telling Jon Stewart, "Anytime you want to cross over to the other side, baby, travel with me."
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Williams's shifting account of his Israeli helicopter ride isn't quite as bad as suggesting he came under fire in Iraq or potentially making up a story about seeing a body floating in Hurricane Katrina floodwaters. Obviously, all reporting from a war zone is dangerous, and following the helicopter ride, Williams and his crew did hear air-raid sirens and scramble into a bomb shelter in Haifa. However, it does not appear that Katyusha rockets were "passing just underneath" Williams's helicopter, or that he was lucky to escape with his life.
WaPo
As expected this morning has williams already nailed with tape story telling rather than truth telling many times. He will be gone in days.
And all he was after was pleasing his audience, but it is getting spun as an ego thing.
This is a sad story.
@ossobuco,
This is exactly the point I was trying to get at when I asked why lie?
Quote:NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up
Why the need to do this? I know some people here said you can get confused on facts -- but really? This is much bigger than just have your facts mixed up and being confused. And he had such a great career already -- why did you have to puff it up and make it any bigger?
@Frank Apisa,
Not all humans -- many humans are perceptive enough to realize that by lying about something like this they will lose everything they have worked so hard to gain and ruin their reputation.
It is the extent of his lie and the fact that a reasonable person would realize that at some point it would be likely to be told he was lying. If it was simply human to do so, then all these other peers and co-workers would not be flummoxed that he continue on with this story.
@Linkat,
Ya, but as robin williams said the audience is right here right now, and they want to be entertained. It takes some self control to not please them if it is in your best interest to not do so. For what ever reason brian williams must have felt that the truth was not going to be a good enough story to get the people to walk away happy.
Lets remember too that brain williams fancies himself a pretty good comedian, and that carlin said that comedy is almost all about modulating of the exaggeration, and that thd exaggeration has to be there.....this tendency to go for the exaggeration is toxic for a journalist. I can see how sitting in that room in front of the cameras knowing that millions of people are watching and wanting to be entertained with a good story was corrosive, how it became too tempting for him to evade journalistic standards.
@Linkat,
Linkat wrote:
This is exactly the point I was trying to get at when I asked why lie?
Quote:NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up
Why the need to do this? I know some people here said you can get confused on facts -- but really? This is much bigger than just have your facts mixed up and being confused. And he had such a great career already -- why did you have to puff it up and make it any bigger?
And now you know, because I explained it in detail.
You're welcome.
@hawkeye10,
In defense of brian williams a part of the general decline of journalism, a pretty big part, is that tv bosses have been encouraging tv journalists to become story tellers rather than fact readers because it makes for better tv (and they think better ratings thus better revenue generators,). We saw the same thing with the Rolling Stone U VA rape piece, which even in conceptualization was an exercise in story telling rather than fact telling. This is what journalism has become in so many places, tabloid, not fourth estate.
@hawkeye10,
A psychiatrist’s view: Why would Brian Williams make up stories?
Quote:What was it used to cover up? If you had an alcoholic father who beat you (and I am not implying in the least that this or any other example I generate describes Mr. Williams), and you want to believe he was a good father, then you could be off to the races, as a confabulator. If you had a sister who confronted a deadly illness as a child, and your family wanted you to believe it was the flu that kept coming back, then you could be on your way to being expert at generating cover-ups.
The truth always wins. Ask anyone who uses any drug to try to distance himself from any reality. It never, ever works. And so, now, Mr. Williams would be wise to do the work of uncovering just why the real facts of his very real willingness to be in harm’s way just weren’t gritty enough.
The real admiration of colleagues for his real skills just wasn’t flattering enough. The real success he enjoyed at the top of his profession just wasn’t rich enough.
The psyche or God or one’s self (maybe all the same thing) has a way of bringing you to your knees in an instant, and making you confront the very things you have been running from. Brian Williams may find himself at that very moment.
And, as strange as it sounds, and as painful as it could be, it could be a transformational one.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/02/09/psychiatrists-view-why-would-brian-williams-make-up-stories/
Likely that it was much more simple than this: Brian Williams could not tell a story in the first person unless he was where the action is, so he put himself where the action was if reality did not have him there because then he could give the audience what they wanted. He is in the people pleasing business, the ratings business, a good story goes far to get it done, as he learned from Tim Russert.
Quote:but if the current internal investigation concludes that Williams is not a serial prevaricator, NBC may be able to avoid firing him.
http://variety.com/2015/tv/opinion/brian-williams-nbc-iraq-fire-investigation-1201428818/
It has and it will, so he has to go.
