My excuse for continuing to focus on this is that I have been working on a couple of memory lectures over the weekend and have been building them around this story. What is interesting to me about your post is that in its basic structure I not only agree with it, but have stated the essential argument here myself several times: Credibility is key, informal and social dishonesty is acceptable in a journalist, but becomes disqualifying the closer it gets to formal reporting.
The difference between us hinges on a couple of key phrases in your post" One is "reasonably accurate", where we have an interpretive difference, and the other is your claim that "it doesn't matter whether the misstatements were deliberate or a false memory". I suspect that you (and a majority of the public following this story) are wildly over-estimating the standard for "reasonably" accurate memory of any event, mundane or dramatic. And If it really does not matter if misstatements are deliberate or due to false memory, then every single one of us is a liar and never to be trusted, and the whole idea of credibility goes out the window. As far as has been established by publicly available evidence, the real "sin"* committed by Brian Williams as a journalist is not that he made statements that exaggerate or distort the known facts, but that he made these statements in role too close to that of a television journalist without adequately fact checking them. What we expect of journalists is not that they have better memories than most people, but that they do not tell us things about the world in their capacity as a journalist without carefully double and triple checking them with independent sources. Williams did not do that, got caught, and has been humiliated. As I have said from the start, he deserves the feelings of humiliation - just no more so than the average TV journalist who reports on TV seemingly every day rumor and innuendo and speculation without at least double and reliable sourcing. The reason why the distinction between false memory and deliberate lying is important is that the former deserves our disdain in the context of official reports, while the latter is a just cause for being fired. One reason I will be disgusted if NBC caves into the blood-thirst of the crowd and fires Williams (assuming the known facts do not change) is that if they do so it will be in an attempt to distract us from the fact that they (and their competitors) make far more serious credibility mistakes every week. Brian Williams looks like he is about to be crucified for the sins of television journalism. On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 3:33 AM, JW <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm sorry, but I've been thinking about this much more than either it > deserves or I care about what happens to Williams. It has to do with what's > appropriate for a newscaster. > > There's are two components to the reporter's storytelling: venue and > content. If Williams is hanging with his buddies at the firehouse*, he can > tell any story he wants. They may love it, or they may roll their eyes and > say "Here he goes telling us about how he killed Bin Laden again," but > there's no harm. Even if it ends up in the Post, all he has to say is that > he's not reporting, he's just entertaining friends. > > Once he goes into a more public forum, though, the calculus changes. When > Tom Brokaw goes on Letterman and tells about a fishing trip to Patagonia, > there's no problem if he changes details to make the story more > entertaining, as long as it's just about him and his pals. If local > authorities are involved, Brokaw then needs to be reasonably accurate. > (It's the difference between a private complaint from a friend and a public > complaint from an entity he might have to cover in another context.) And in > the segment where he's discussing the news of the day, he's acting as a > reporter, with all the obligations to truthfulness that entails, even if > the conclusions he expresses turn out to be wrong. Once Williams is telling > Dave about his adventures as a reporter, he loses some latitude in making > the story more entertaining. > > And on the Nightly News, any untrue statements affect the credibility of > the newscast. In fact, I don't think the complaints about the helicopter > tale became public until Williams told the story on the Nightly News, even > if there had been complaints to Brian and/or NBC when he told the story on > the Late Show. And it doesn't matter whether the misstatements were > deliberate or a false memory; the questions it raises about Williams' > future reporting are the same. > > *-Sadly, I'm tempted to add an "assuming that's true" to the firehouse > mention. > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... 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