Brian Williams is either lying or unforgivably incompetent

by Brian Mann on February 5th, 2015

I Source: NBC

There’s been a lot said in recent day about the anger that Iraq veterans feel about Brian Williams account of his experience aboard a helicopter during the war in 2003. Williams infamously claimed that he was aboard a chopper that took AK-47 and RPG fire.

After being confronted by furious soldiers, angered by the apparent deception, he now acknowledges that this narrative was untrue. Williams also, however, suggested that he was himself the victim of a kind of false memory, that his error was regrettable but inadvertent and perhaps even innocent.

“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.”

Very likely, there is more fact-finding to be done here, but as a journalist, I find myself very nearly as furious as those veterans. Service-members were disrespected by Williams’ phony heroism. But it’s our credibility, our ethical standards that are on the line.

As this scandal evolves, here’s why I think Williams’ own reputation is permanently shot.

When a journalist — especially an extremely high-level journalist like Williams — goes into a conflict zone, he’s not traveling alone. He’s accompanied by a field crew. In helping to break this story, Stars and Stripes, a news outlet that focuses on military affairs, confirmed that Williams was part of an NBC team during that 2003 trip into the desert.

In other words, it wasn’t just Williams who would have needed a false memory of this event. His camera-person, his producer — the entire apparatus that produced NBC’s award-winning Iraq coverage — would have needed to have experienced collective brain freeze. The idea that all those NBC personnel forgot the facts over the last decade? Hard to swallow.

But even if Williams wasn’t deliberately lying, he still chose to take his story public, repeatedly, offering highly specific details, without doing even the most basic journalistic diligence. This was a guy treating a highly sensitive event — there’s no story more serious. And he had resources at his fingertips that would have allowed him to easily double-check his memory, confirm his impressions. One call to his producer? A look back at the footage? Heck, he might have gone old-school and checked his own notes.

Instead, Williams went on the Letterman show and portrayed himself as a front-line battlefield journalist, a guy taking incoming fire at the tip of the spear of America’s invasion of Iraq. Getting it so horribly over and over? That makes him either a pathological liar and an insufferable blowhard, or a profoundly incompetent journalist who played fast and loose with exactly the kind of story you should treat with the deepest respect.

Listening back to the self-aggrandizing, false-modest tone of the yarns he spun about this event — and listening this week to the shameful mock-apology Williams offered, arguing that his narrative was motivated by a modest desire to honor American soldiers — it seemed less and less important which is true. A rotten journalist or a rotten liar? Who cares. Either way, his reputation is done.

So here’s where things stand. Williams has offered an apology to Iraq vets. That’s a good start. Next he should offer an apology to the journalists who actually report ethically and courageously from war zones all over the world. Where his career goes after that? I guess he’ll have to make something up.