So Brian Williams has been embellishing his resume with imagined derring-do. Is anyone really surprised? Long ago news anchors ceased to be seasoned reporters and became blow-dried pretty-boys and girls.
UP reporter Walter Cronkite was in a B-17 over Normandy on D-Day, but his plane took no fire and the weather was so bad they couldn’t to see to drop their bombs. He was annoyed at having missed the action, but felt no need to make the tale exciting in order to burnish his ego. His business was reporting the news, not trying to become the news.
By D-Day he had already covered battles in North Africa and would soon land in a glider at the ill-fated Market Garden operation and report from the Battle of the Bulge. Later he reported Nuremberg, hosted the history show “You Are There,” anchored network convention coverage starting in 1952, and talked to a puppet on a CBS morning show before taking the evening news anchor chair in 1962, twenty-five years after joining United Press.
A far cry from anchors today whose most dangerous previous assignments have been attending the daily press briefings of the White House or engaging in co-ed ego duels on such snake pits as the Today Show. Cronkite became “the most trusted man in America” by doing his job straight, not by telling you about his family, private life, hobbies, opinions or by showing up on comedy shows trying to be cool. He was cool not because he pandered, but because he didn’t.
Williams makes $13 million a year for reading headlines in an amiable manner and introducing reports by actual reporters in the field. In his spare time, he’s a guest clown on The Daily Show, Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show and Letterman. He’s always been a lightweight.
We, or network executives avid for ratings, seem to like their news guys boyish and confident, rather than weathered and authoritative. They are supposed to be able to feign a worldly-wise demeanor without making matters too complicated, to be modest macho men rather than pencil-necked geeks, but always to make things go down easy in bite-size pieces. It’s network TV, dummy.
It now comes out, however, that Williams has been punching up his part in the play with falsehoods, to make himself sound like a real trench-coated reporter braving danger to bring back the news instead of a guy in a private jet and a luxury suite occasionally propped up in front of a palm tree which is being used to represent a war zone.
Some real reporters are now on his trail and have discovered he has a reputation around NBC for exaggerating his role as bystander into stardom. A helicopter near his in Iraq once took fire. In his retelling this grew over the year into his helicopter and if he hadn’t been caught would eventually probably have featured him hanging from the skids like Tom Cruise over Kirkuk to help lift escaping women and children on a flight to fly safety.
Covering Katrina he heard about a suicide leap from the upper deck of the Superdome and soon he was an eyewitness, to hear him tell it. He also claimed to have seen dead bodies floating outside his hotel (the Ritz-Carleton), armed gangs invading the place and his own near-death experience from dysentery. None of these thrilling tales were reported on NBC news broadcasts but as part of his gigs as raconteur on late night shows. So maybe he was trying fitfully to keep fact and fiction separate
Did he think no one would notice he was committing imaginary news? People did notice and more and more are now coming out of the woodwork. Hotel employees medical personnel and other eyewitnesses from New Orleans and soldiers from Iraq report no gangs, too little water for floating bodies, no dysentery during Katrina and no damage to Williams helicopter in Iraq.
It’s Walter Mitty at the anchor desk. Not content with a facility for reading a teleprompter that has brought him a net worth of $40 million, he seems to have felt some need to imagine himself not just a real foreign correspondent in flak jacket, but a star in his own thriller.
Williams may be an extreme case, and his self-puffery seems to have a long history. There are now reports that as a child he was prone to fabulize his exploits. But he is a product of a media environment that rewards flash over substance, that blurs the lines between reporting the news and participating in it, between the news business and show business, between reality and fantasy.
How many of the things said each day on the network news shows, not to mention the ersatz news channels like MSNBC and FOX are factual news reports as opposed to opinionated fugues inspired by the facts? Very few.
In an honest world, Williams would be out on his ear for abusing the public trust and could turn his talents to fiction or the performing arts. But given the times in which we live, he may survive to falsify again.