AUDASE

After a Decade Building Trust, an Anchor Starts a Firestorm With One Wrong Move

Brian Williams’s War Story

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY NYY TIMES

It is a "thing that you build slowly, over time," according to grandiloquent promos last fall that extolled Brian Williams’s 10th anniversary as anchor of "NBC Nightly News." Over shots of Mr. Williams talking to soldiers and small children in war zones and disaster areas, the narrator, Michael Douglas, adds, "And what you build, if you work hard enough, if you respect it, is a powerful thing called trust."

It may take 10 years to earn it, but trust in news anchors can be shaken in less than 10 minutes.                         (Cartoon Mike Luckovich AJC)

And that’s the hard lesson of Mr. Williams’s brush with scandal for telling a tale — more than once — about being under fire in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003 that turned out not to be true. When a recent NBC News segment repeated the false version, veterans who witnessed the event complained on Facebook, and the military newspaper Stars and Stripes published an article about the fudged facts.

On the NBC evening newscast on Thursday, Mr. Williams looked a little subdued but said nothing more about the disputed event.

On Wednesday, he had apologized for what he described as a "bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and by extension our brave military men and women veterans everywhere."

What’s interesting, of course, is why he twisted the facts in the first place.

Public figures have differing reasons for embellishing their bona fides, but it most often is in the service of compensating for a perceived inadequacy or vulnerability. And television is a double-edged enabler; the camera can aggrandize normal people, but it can also undo grandiosity.

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut stumbled during his 2010 campaign when The New York Times found a videotape of him telling a veterans group in 2008 that he had served in Vietnam. He hadn’t. Mr. Blumenthal sought multiple deferments, and when he ran out of them in 1970, he won a coveted niche in the Marine Reserve in Washington.

Mr. Blumenthal did serve in the military at the time of the Vietnam War, but he led people to believe he had been in harm’s way.

Hillary Rodham Clinton made a similar gaffe during her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. She described having dashed across the tarmac to dodge sniper fire during a 1996 visit to Bosnia when she was first lady. Video of the event quickly surfaced that showed Mrs. Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, calmly and safely shaking hands with local dignitaries. Mrs. Clinton had to admit she misspoke.

Mrs. Clinton at the time was running on her experience and knowledge of the world. Bosnia wasn’t a safe place to be in 1996. It’s just that the airport tarmac on that day wasn’t nearly as dangerous as Mrs. Clinton preferred to remember it.

Mr. Williams has been NBC’s chief anchor for a decade, and the truth about television news is that the higher you rise, the less real reporting you do. Anchors mostly travel to war zones and disaster areas to show the flag and signal the story’s magnitude; wars, disasters and presidential visits serve as backdrops. Anchors aren’t there to ask questions and take notes; they are there to bolster network prestige and project their own journalistic derring-do, donning work shirts, flak jackets and helmets to look the part.

But they also take risks and experience fear and discomfort and far worse: the NBC reporter David Bloom died covering the Iraq war in 2003; in 2006, ABC’s anchor, Bob Woodruff, suffered a brain injury and almost died in Iraq. Mr. Williams wasn’t in the helicopter that took RPG fire — he was in a different one behind it. But he was in a front-line zone in 2003, and he and his crew were grounded for several days in a sandstorm.

His experience wasn’t as perilous as he painted it to be, but it was certainly dangerous and scary. This was a year before he became the chief anchor, two years before he made his bones covering Hurricane Katrina, and Mr. Williams back then was still seen by many as a television star whose rise had more to do with his suave manner and good looks (he was one of GQ’s men of the year in 2001) than hardship posts overseas.

War stories get more polished in the retelling, and the temptation to self-aggrandize is all the greater, and easier, for people who are puffed up by the camera lens and the cult of celebrity. By the time Mr. Williams told the story to David Letterman in 2013, he sounded like Sergeant York.

A public apology is just the first step, and Mr. Williams’s mea culpa wasn’t very humble. He made his fib sound like a one-time misguided effort to pay homage to veterans. This time Mr. Williams really is under fire: He must now endure days of media scrutiny, schadenfreude from his rivals and an overflow of social media scorn, snark and satire. He has been at the top of his field and the ratings for a decade, but time has shown that these kinds of disgraces linger, not so much forgotten as sometimes subsumed by the next celebrity misstep.

The weirdest thing about the scandal is that Mr. Williams didn’t make a journalistic blunder — as, say, the former CBS anchor Dan Rather did in 2004 with a flawed "60 Minutes" report on President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. (As a result, Mr. Rather was forced to step down as "CBS Evening News" anchor.) But these days, network newscasts are so personality-driven that the anchor’s personal life — and in Mr. William’s case, that includes his daughter’s acting career — is flaunted on the air and treated like news. And by that equation, a personal failing looms almost as large as a professional one.

Those puffy NBC promos that promote Mr. Williams’s "battle scars" and "integrity" don’t help. As one of them puts it, "You can’t see experience, but you know it when it’s there."