Journalists make mistakes.
I’ve made plenty over my 30-year career. Some are getting a date wrong, misspelling a name, placing a decimal in the wrong place (journalists are often bad at math and science) and you have to write a correction. Other times you miss the context, the flavor.
And sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night, slapping your head over a misheard word or a poorly written sentence that hurt someone.
Brian Williams, the top-rated news anchor for NBC, didn’t make a mistake when he implied for years and then finally said that he was aboard a Chinook helicopter in Iraq that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in 2003.
He deliberately misled.
In his apologies, he has said that his memory was fogged over the years. But if you watch his initial report in 2003, he was happy to imply he was in the thick of the action, saying “it did give us a glimpse into the war being fought as few have seen it.”
And the embellishment escalated until it became a lie.
In 2013, he led David Letterman to believe he was on the wounded chopper while on that talk show, saying they had to land and land fast.
And now the Stars and Stripes publication is reporting that Williams wasn’t even on a closely following chopper that day – as Williams said in his Wednesday broadcast apology – but in one that was a good distance away and not even travelling in the same direction.
It is the journalistic equivalent of stolen valor – falsely claiming you’ve been in the military or received combat honors. At one point, there was a big push to make that against the law – it even went all the way to the Supreme Court.
But it’s certainly against all standards of decency and honor, which is why, locally, we’ve seen a county sheriff’s deputy and a Richmond medic straight-up fired for falsely reporting acts of heroism or combat-like encounters.
It’s just galling, particularly measured against truly harrowing incidents.
I vividly recall hearing about the 2004 mortar attack on the mess tent at the U.S. base in Mosul, Iraq, that killed 22. Inside that tent at the time were two of my co-workers at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reporter Jeremy Redmon and photographer Dean Hoffmeyer.
Their stories – and Dean’s pictures – truly offered “a glimpse into the war being fought as few have seen it,” to use Williams’ self-aggrandizing words.
Jeremy and Dean (particularly Dean) offered their experiences reluctantly, and certainly didn’t embroider them or wear them like some kind of journalistic merit badge.
As retired Navy Seal John McGuire of Richmond told me today, Williams’ dishonesty dishonors those soldiers who experience combat as well as the journalists who risk their lives to tell those real stories of war.
Especially in a time in which journalists are being captured, imprisoned and beheaded.
This thing makes the recent Rolling Stone UVa rape debacle look like an error by a journalism intern.
Williams may well deploy the short-attention-span parachute that the pioneering scandal-slipper Bill Clinton used during his impeachment tumble, and just keep on broadcasting like nothing happened.
And no doubt, we will move on quickly to our next outrage-of-the-moment.
But this is a particularly flammable time for Brian Williams’ journalistic meltdown.
The nation has been sharply and powerfully divided by the film, “American Sniper,” already the most watched war film of all time and one that has inflamed passions about our involvement in the Middle East and how patriotic service should be defined.
There’s just no room in the middle ground – where journalists are supposed to reside - for a high-profile news anchor who fibbed repeatedly about his combat experience.
That’s my take. Please share yours here on Facebook.com.
