For some time now, there have been two versions of Brian Williams. One is an Emmy-winning, sober, talented anchor on the “NBC Nightly News” and the other is a funny, urbane celebrity who hosts “Saturday Night Live,” slow-jams the news with Jimmy Fallon and crushes it in every speech and public appearance he makes.
Each of those personas benefited the other, and his fame and appeal grew accordingly, past the anchor chair he occupied every weeknight and into a realm of celebrity that reaches all demographics and platforms. Even young people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching the evening news know who Mr. Williams is.
Which is good until it isn’t.
It was Mr. Williams himself who brought those two worlds together at the end of his newscast over a week ago when he broadcast a segment in which he was shown at a Rangers game in a tribute to a retiring command sergeant major, who, Mr. Williams suggested, had evacuated him from a dangerous situation in Iraq.
“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an R.P.G.,” Mr. Williams said, introducing the segment, referring to a rocket-propelled grenade. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”
But Stars and Stripes, the military publication, was tipped off that a thread popped up on NBC’s Facebook page about the segment from soldiers who were there that day in 2003, saying Mr. Williams was describing something that happened to another helicopter, not his, and that he arrived later.
Confronted with this, Mr. Williams acknowledged his mistake on his newscast last Wednesday, and offered up a muddled apology, saying he had conflated events in his memory. And then in a statement over the weekend, he said, “In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions.” He added: “As managing editor of ‘NBC Nightly News,’ I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days.”
The perceptions of the weak, confused apology, and suspending himself for as long as he chooses, are not good for Mr. Williams or his employer. A full-throated, unmodulated apology is the only thing that will satisfy a public who placed their trust in him. And his voluntary step back, however well intended, suggests he is answerable only to himself. Indeed, the investigation at NBC will be led internally, by the head of investigations, who depends on Mr. Williams to make room for his work on the newscast.
Deborah Turness, the embattled head of the news division, needed to demonstrate that someone was in charge of Mr. Williams and his fate. The American public won’t abide someone putting himself into the naughty corner and setting the conditions for staying there.
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Beyond those strategic failures, if you are going to tell a war story that sprints past the truth, it best not be about war. Those of us who worked the Hurricane Katrina coverage rolled our eyes at some of the stories Mr. Williams told of the mayhem there, but it was a dark, confusing place and a lot of bad stuff happened, so who were we to judge? But armed service and its perils are seen as sacred and must not be trifled with. The soldiers who ended up in harm’s way and survived that day are calling him out because their moral code requires it.
In an email to my colleague Ravi Somaiya, Joe Summerlin, who was actually on the Chinook that came under fire, well ahead of Mr. Williams’s helicopter, said he was not out for blood, but he finds Mr. Williams’s response so far to be insufficient.
“Everyone tells lies,” he wrote. “Every single one of us. The issue isn’t whether or not you lie. It is how you deal with it once you are caught. I thank you for stepping down for a few nights, Mr. Williams. Now can you admit that you didn’t ‘misremember’ and perform a real apology? I might even buy you a beer.”
Mr. Summerlin is right. I wrote a book some years back about the nature of memory and the stories we tell ourselves and others. Stories tend to grow over time and, if they are told often enough, they harden into a kind of new truth for the teller. Mr. Williams has been on almost every talk show you can think of and that requires not only a different skill set — he is a gifted and funny performer — but stories in abundance.
It’s useful to note that Mr. Williams initially reported the story fundamentally as it had happened — although the soldiers on hand say he exaggerated the danger to himself even then — and over time, as he retold it, he moved into the middle of it, so that the story became something that happened to him. All those 1 percent enhancements along the way add up and can leave the teller a long way from the truth.
The evolution of his account was evident in a 2013 appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman.”
“We were in some helicopters. What we didn’t know is we were north of the invasion,” he said. “Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in, R.P.G. and AK-47.”
I haven’t reported from a war zone, but I know the fog of war requires an excess of caution. You can’t toe-touch and tell tall tales later. His NBC colleague David Bloom died of a pulmonary embolism while covering the war in 2003. In 2006 in Iraq, Bob Woodruff of ABC suffered a traumatic brain injury. Many, many journalists have been maimed or died in pursuit of the truth, and those who survive don’t generally speak about it much.
As the evening news anchor, Mr. Williams possesses a rare combination of fame and trust, with each feeding off the other. But fame is slippery, morphing into infamy very quickly, as Mr. Williams discovered in four days of sustained pounding. Everyone loves a story about seeing the mighty fall, even if they are as fundamentally likeable as Mr. Williams. (NBC confirmed that Mr. Williams would not be making a scheduled appearance on Mr. Letterman’s show this week.)
As it turns out, his non-apology was not a safe haven, but a trap door, and his self-banishment was not a consequence, but a mistake.
I don’t know if Mr. Williams will lose his job. I don’t think he should — his transgressions were not a fundamental part of his primary responsibilities. But if the executives who run NBC come to believe that he can’t credibly cover combat or hurricanes, or call a politician on a lie, they will dismiss him even though there is no plan in place for succession.
I watched him read the news on Friday night. Even playing hurt, he is very good at it. And I thought about how weird it would be to see him doing the job in a hair shirt for months or years to come. It’s an image that clanks.
We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it. That’s why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole heaving apparatus to far-flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag bearer.
We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe-trotting, hilarious, down-to-earth, and above all, trustworthy. It’s a job description that no one can match.
