{"id":19131,"date":"2015-02-05T22:05:36","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T03:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=19131"},"modified":"2015-02-05T22:09:38","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T03:09:38","slug":"brian-williams-is-either-lying-or-unforgivably-incompetent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2015\/02\/05\/brian-williams-is-either-lying-or-unforgivably-incompetent\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Williams is either lying or unforgivably incompetent"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Source:<\/a>

I Source: NBC<\/p><\/div>\n

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.\u00a0 Williams infamously claimed that he was aboard a chopper that took AK-47 and RPG fire.<\/p>\n

After being confronted by furious soldiers, angered by the apparent deception, he now acknowledges that this narrative was untrue.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would not have chosen to make this mistake,\u201d Williams said<\/a>. \u201cI don\u2019t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Service-members were disrespected by Williams’ phony heroism.\u00a0 But it’s our credibility, our ethical standards that are on the line.<\/p>\n

As this scandal evolves, here’s why I think Williams’ own reputation is permanently shot.<\/p>\n

When a journalist — especially an extremely high-level journalist like Williams — goes into a conflict zone, he’s not traveling alone.\u00a0 He’s accompanied by a field crew.\u00a0 In helping to break this story, Stars and Stripes<\/a>, a news outlet that focuses on military affairs, confirmed that Williams was part of an NBC team during that 2003 trip into the desert.<\/p>\n

In other words, it wasn’t just Williams who would have needed a false memory of this event.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Hard to swallow.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 This was a guy treating a highly sensitive event — there’s no story more serious. \u00a0 And he had resources at his fingertips that would have allowed him to easily double-check his memory, confirm his impressions.\u00a0 One call to his producer?\u00a0 A look back at the footage?\u00a0 Heck, he might have gone old-school and checked his own notes.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Getting it so horribly\u00a0 over and over?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 A rotten journalist or a rotten liar? \u00a0 Who cares.\u00a0 Either way, his reputation is done.<\/p>\n

So here’s where things stand.\u00a0 Williams has offered an apology to Iraq vets.\u00a0 That’s a good start.\u00a0 Next he should offer an apology to the journalists who actually report ethically and courageously from war\u00a0 zones all over the world.\u00a0\u00a0 Where his career goes after that?\u00a0 I guess he’ll have to make something up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been a lot said in recent day about the anger that Iraq veterans feel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19131"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19135,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19131\/revisions\/19135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}