Lying in the media is as much an American tradition as apple pie and toddler beauty pageants. You can go back as far as the Civil War to find staged photographs and even further to see newspapers spouting total crap just to sell papers.
If you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last week let me bring you up to speed. It was discovered that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams lied about certain aspects of his time in Iraq in the early 2000’s, particularly regarding how the helicopter he was in was being shot at. It wasn’t.
The fact that news anchor Brian Williams lied to get an entertaining story was not a shock. In fact I didn’t even look up from my cereal when I heard the news. Him lying about the news is not the issue: it’s that his violation as probably the most trusted man in news ruined his character and made the world just a little darker.
It’s like when you realize your family friend of 20 years has been peddling crack to teens. The crack part is the least of it. Just the notion that someone you put so much faith could act like a total dingus is enough to shake your balance in reality.
I mean here is a guy who is probably the only man in news anchor history to host Saturday Night Live. He is an icon. Why would he ruin that just to fall to the level of every other journalist?
But like I said, the fact he lied shouldn’t be a shocker. I would bet most of my worldly possessions that most TV journalists have played with the truth before. The benefit they have, that Williams does not, is that they haven’t been caught. And that is what he is paying for.
The news is that he was caught lying and that is what angers people the most. What he lied about is almost irrelevant. Williams was a man in the top 25 most trusted people in America, according to the Marketing Arm. Then we discovered his famous blueberry pie comes from a can.
And that is the worst of it. Paying attention to the news is already a gamble. Trust is something you put on the line. You should be able to turn on the news and be able to look a man in the eyes and hope to God he is telling the truth. Very rarely does that end up proving beneficial, but Williams seemed like the one man who you could believe in, if not as a reporter then as a just human being.
Mark Twain said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” People have known since the early days of journalism that you can’t trust everything you hear or read in the news. But what you should be able to do is trust someone as a person and hope for the best in them. Williams ruined his reputation not as a newsman, but as a man in general. But despite all I’ve just said the worst part is that Williams, of NBC, made FOX look good for a few days. That is a few days too many.
