n Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 12:05 PM, David Lynch <[email protected]> wrote:
> New York Magazine points out a bunch of other tall tales that Williams has > reportedly told, including rolling into Baghdad with SEAL Team 6 and > meeting Pope John Paul II (no word on whether BriWi reported that the Pope > was catholic, but at this point I'd wait for independent confirmation.) > > Much as I thought the initial thing was kind of overblown, I don't see how > he comes back from all of this stuff being thrown at him. > > > http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/williams-might-have-also-lied-about-seals.html > I want to start by stating again that I own no stock in Brian Williams. I am not related to the man, and have never met him. For all I know he is a psychopathic liar. I don't really fancy being in the position of defending him. But even more, I do not fancy witch hunts, and this has all the aroma of one. More objectionable to me than any sin Williams has so far been demonstrated to have committed is the sloppy and salivating way this story is being reported. The headline on the linked article here is "Brian Williams Might Have Also Lied About Navy SEALs, the Pope, and the Berlin Wall". Really? That is not reporting, it is innuendo. If they find a picture of Williams standing in front of a Kindergarden in Iraq in 2004 are they going to headline it with "Brian Williams Might Be A Pedophile"? The actual article provides no direct evidence that Williams lied about any of the three events, and even if all the inferences drawn are true, most would amount to exaggeration and conflation which in any other context would not be seen as worthy of much comment (e.g. first he remembers the Pope walking by him when he was in college; years later he remembers shaking his hand. Is that discrepancy really worthy of being portrayed as a lie?). These three stories, and the Katrina stories, are for the most part unremarkable. The only meaningful way to determine if they represent a significant deviation from the norm for reporters would be to subject 2 or 3 other Network anchors to the same intensive scrutiny that Williams' public statements over the years have no doubt been receiving, and see if Williams's record really is marked by significantly more exaggerations, distortions and inconsistencies than the average person with a similar range and extent of experiences. As has been pointed out repeatedly by others in recent days, the pontificating holier-than-thou Brokaw was unambiguously guilty of a much larger journalistic crime in his reporting of the Atlanta Olympic bombing story, and managed to avoid termination. This whole bru ha ha reminds me of the kind of feeding frenzy we see when someone is accused of plagiarism. Scores of researchers go through every published word of the target, and inevitably find several examples of quotes or minor paraphrasing given without proper attribution. Now, in some of those cases, the target is either dishonest or so sloppy and incompetent a scholar that their credibility is justifiably forfeit. But in others (e.g. Ambrose, Goodwin) while there may be one or two instances unjustifiable borrowing, most of the other examples dredged from the larger corpus is simply the kind of crossing of blurred lines of common practice that most everyone in the field knows happens all the time, and hardly ever comments on. If you were accused of running a rad light and killing a child, those who wanted to prove you were an irresponsible driver might dig up traffic photos showing that you did not come to complete stops at posted intersections 10 times in the last 5 years. Again, we may be hours or days away from a tearful confession from Williams in which he admits that for years he has deliberately lied about his past in order to make himself a more interesting guest for Dave, Jon and Leno. As I noted a while back, I think Joe's original point that Williams has too often blurred the line between his journalistic and entertainment television appearances has been confirmed, and Joe deserves a lot of credit for making this observation long before the current frenzy. But if the evidence remains as it is, and Williams does not survive the controversy it will not be because he has been proven to be a liar, but because NBC could not find the courage and competence to manage the PR storm. Or, to put it another way, it will be because the mob tied Williams up, threw his body into the river, and he sunk. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. 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