Brian Williams and his memory. And his profession.

No, his stolen valor is not a small offense and he should resign immediately. How do you "misremember" an event involving a helicopter that was about to crash? It's a life altering event. He should be ashamed of himself for repeating that lie. But Hillary Clinton told the same lie and got away with it, so why shouldn't Brian Williams?


Link

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Updated On: 2/5/15 at 09:37 PM

I wonder if this means curtains for Allison Williams and future NBC televised musicals...

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They should cancel Girls now.

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Front page on the Times today, and then carried over in the business section, a telling component. It's a journalistic integrity issue, yet it's being framed as "business" of course because it's a branding issue. That's not just my cynicism.

As I read the entire account, I'm aware of the insidious nature of this: the man outright lied. Not misremembered. Lied. Remember lying? That thing we don't do in our professional or personal lives? It's startling to me how quickly Alessandra Stanley, that nuanced arbiter of winning and losing on television's crowded playing field, semi-rushes to Williams's defense, as if she's talking about an actor, not a journalist. If this were anyone but the network anchor, he'd be gone. This is about money. Period.

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^Yes, excellent.

“The allure of a hero’s status can be irresistible,” says scholar W. Joseph Campbell, who has written extensively on media myths. “It’s a warping, cinematic effect.” You’d think that Brian Williams, a mega-successful, handsome, funny, high-status multimillionaire journalist wouldn’t need laurels beyond the ones he’s already collected. You’d be wrong."

That's the part worth contemplating. NBC's business decisions will come and. And so will this, so it seems.

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A mountain is being made out of a molehill. When Williams lies to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there'll be a point to the uproar.

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The point is that Williams kept embellishing the lie. It's bad enough to lie, but to continue to make the lie bigger is even worse.

And if news reports are correct, the NBC brass told him to stop telling the story.

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Yes, by all means, let's resort to the intellectual sloth of comparing a network anchor's mistakes to the fabulist-generated propaganda of Fox News. As if we routinely use them as a standard for truth. Or, per one post, pitting Williams's ethics against Bush and Cheney's. A foreign policy blunder being used as a yardstick for a breach in journalistic ethics? In these hyperbolic times, nuance is quickly trampled over to find a facile parallel. I suspected WMD would creep into the discussion quickly. But if we're to pit Williams's lapse against anyone's, it might be worth a look at his self-aggrandizing celebrity enhancements in light of the Times's egregious use of Judith Miller's infamous "reporting." After 9/11 she became a media star (slash whore), appearing on Letterman and Leno to explain Bin Laden to the angry, uninformed Americans. We know how that ended. As a liberal, I would hope we'd hold our journalists to a higher standards, or just traditional ones. Giving Williams a quick pass because he's theoretically aligned with our team doesn't exactly give us the moral high ground.

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Updated On: 2/6/15 at 03:02 PM

Jeez, someone's grumpy. Did The View get preempted today?

Drafting off what Auggie said, Fox lies every day and night. So a lie caught on NBC is cause for the collapse of journalism? I mean...

His daughter's face registers about as much emotion as a brick wall.


I just wanted to add that.

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Mr. Williams will disappear to work on His Narrative. The usual redemptive cycle dictates: silence, a Big Interview (does Oprah still earn this get?) There will be tears. The public mea culpa that's really about how important this is to journalism, not Brian Inc.

In the same week, filled with fanfare for the uncommon man, "Birdman," a story of how brutal it is to age in the entertainment industry ("A revelation!" said no one in the San Fernando Valley, ever) seems to have a new lock on the Oscars (see DGA).

And Bruce Jenner moves to A-list get, after being D-list detritus. A man who made a pact with the devil (see television, reality) allowing cameras to view him doing everything but taking a dump, so long as some of his underachieving baggage of a family can wander into the frame and whine. Now, Bruce vants to be alone. Except to talk to The Last Standing Journalist in the U.S., Diane Sawyer.

See a pattern here?

The lessons learned in 2015 America: Golly but it's darned hard to be in show business, folks! Be ye celebrity anchor with a swelling tale that must be told-slash-recanted; a fictional everyman-action hero facing male menopause's predictable ravages with cool accoutrements, the St. James Theater (what does a 60-year-old unemployed insurance salesman do without a dressing room to trash?); or a narcissistic Olympian whose self-exploitation has been self-parody for a least a decade, who finally has a reason for us to sit up and pay close attention. Oh, the ironies.

I miss Joan Rivers.

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Updated On: 2/8/15 at 06:08 AM