You can color me completely unsurprised by the downfall of Brian Williams, now NBC's erstwhile evening-news anchor, as a consequence of his complete "inability to remember" whether or not he was blown out of the sky during the Iraq war. You can also put me down as saying, as I now do, that Williams will never work in journalism again; the six-months-without-pay "suspension" NBC has given him is, in all probability, a grace period that will allow him to transition to some other line of work. I have no idea what that "other" line of work will be for him. Maybe he can go work for Fox, where credibility is more of a liability than an asset. Or perhaps, as has been suggested, maybe he should take over Jon Stewart's job at Comedy Central, now that Stewart has (tragically) decided to leave it. Williams was rumored to covet the "Tonight Show" hosting job; perhaps replacing Stewart would be the next best thing. But more on Stewart later.
I have never liked Williams. In part, it's precisely because of the fact that he sought out celebrity status in a way that can't help but to undermine his pretensions to be a journalist. But it's also because that showboating managed to work its way into his actual journalism. I'll never forget the time Williams conducted an interview with Mel Brooks, not long after Brooks' wife of decades, actress Anne Bancroft, passed away. Williams tried to bring up the subject of Bancroft's death in an awkwardly direct, almost confrontational way, and Brooks responded by shutting the subject down. "No," he said, visibly upset, "we're not going there." To which Williams responded, "Why not?"
Why the hell not do you think, Brian? The man just lost his wife! It's not as if that's the only topic you could bring up, or that it would even be necessary to bring up the subject of Bancroft if she were still alive. What Williams was angling for was transparently obvious. He wanted to amp up the emotional impact of the interview, complete with footage of Brooks grieving. And Brooks wouldn't give it to him, for which I give him major props. And Williams' question only underscored how pissed he was at not getting his "moment."
That's why I'm not surprised that his Iraq dissembling was outed, or that, as it turns out, Mr. "NBC Nice Guy" turned out to have very few friends at the network. When your career is based on showboating, and not on actually doing the job you're being paid millions of dollars to do, it's only a matter of time before you're hung on the scaffold you've built for yourself. But that's not to say that Williams is completely without defenders, if not friends. One person who falls into both categories, as it turns out, is Stewart. Along with Cenk Uygur in The Huffington Post, Stewart put Williams' fibbing into context, namely, the complete failure of legacy media to accurately report ANYTHING about the Iraq war, beginning with the run-up to the actual war itself. Not exactly a defense, of course, but a point worth making.
Brian Williams is not an isolated case. Rather, he is the product of a decades-long effort to reduce American journalism to the level of tabloid journalism--an effort, I am sorry to say, that has been almost completely successful. Profits before public service, personalities ahead of the public's need to know, scandals instead of serious investigations, stories long on short-term heat and short on long-term implications--keep all of that going long enough, and you'll chase away every reporter with any serious interest in damn-the-consequences digging for the truth. Watergate would have flown completely under the radar of today's "media coverage." Which is why we now have scandals worse than Watergate, and politicians worse than Richard Nixon.
Yes, Williams has to go. But so does the corporate control of the Fourth Estate. NBC is a particularly bad example; it's owned by General Electric, Ronald Reagan's former employer, which transformed itself during the Reagan years from a please purveyor of consumer electronics (remember how they would "bring good things to life"?) into one of the biggest, if not the biggest defense contractors in the country. Do you doubt for a minute that they had, shall we say, a pecuniary interest in having their network promote the march to disaster that became the Iraq war?
What needs to be done? Stop watching. I'm serious. If that means getting all of your news from the Web, so be it. I haven't watched legacy media (except for election nights) in years. And it hasn't hurt my ability to keep up with things. Stop giving them viewers, and there's just maybe a chance that the powers that be will give up using the press to spoon-feed us misinformation. Maybe then, we'll once again have real journalists reporting real news, without fear or favor. Maybe then, the Brian Williamses of the world will be a thing of the past.
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