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Welcome to www.TheReminder.com archive for past articles!/Opinion/G. Michael Dobbs/Credibility of Williams, NBC could be irreparably tarnished
Credibility of Williams, NBC could be irreparably tarnishedDate: 2/12/2015 My Facebook feed certainly reflected the explosion surrounding the admission that NBC News anchor Brian Williams admitted he had lied in telling a story about being in aircraft that took fire while covering the Iraq War.
I alternate between watching NBC and ABC and that night I happened to be on NBC. I was shocked at what I heard from Williams and even more shocked when it was apparent that he was not going to suffer any consequences from his action.
Although NBC has suspended him from the newscast for six months that does not solve the problem that he has trashed his credibility.
I’m afraid I am very old school about this kind of unfortunate incident. The simple truth is that Williams should step down himself or be terminated. The most important element a news outlet can have is the trust between it and its consumers. Once that trust is gone, there is a huge problem that can only be solved by taking drastic steps to rebuild it.
Reporters are human. We all make mistakes. A mistake of not understanding something well or omitting a key fact is regrettable. We all miss something from time to time. It can also be fixed.
What cannot be fixed is when a reporter, editor or publisher decides to represent a story from a predetermined point of view or when someone decides to publish a story that is a lie to advance an agenda.
Many years ago, as a reporter I had that done to me at the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram. My editor changed a story I had written because he didn’t personally like the subject. Of course, he kept my name on the piece.
I suspect in Williams’ case, he just couldn’t resist gilding the lily. Covering a war is pretty impressive in my book, but Williams had to add an element to make his efforts even more compelling.
There was plenty of conservative backlash to the Williams story. Some people instantly wanted to cast all of this in a liberal versus conservative news outlet fight.
Let me just say this isn’t about politics. This is about a person in a position of great responsibility who blew it by repeating a false story.
I assume all corporate news to have an agenda and some are more benign than others. I think the most informed people are those who obtain their news from several different outlets and different mediums. Mix print with radio with foreign news websites for a more complete perspective.
Anchors are perhaps the oddest position in the news business. If you’re a good reporter, someone might suggest that you become an anchor, a position that doesn’t include reporting, but instead some editing. You have successively separated yourself from the very activity that you supposedly love.
The BBC has it right by calling people “news readers.”
By the way, the history of the American press is filled with moments of editors and publishers slanting the news to fit a political or social agenda. What is happening on talk radio or on cable news is nothing unique in our history, except for one factor: we purport now as an industry to be objective and to present a story from all of it angles. In the 19th century, for instance, there were ‘papers there were unabashedly Democrat or Republican or labor or for one ethnic group. A reader knew ahead of time what he or she was reading.
The divide between our high-minded goal of objectivity in the news pages and the political intent of the entity operating the news outlet is a wide one.
For instance, I don’t mind the FOX cable news in anti-Democrat, anti-Obama, anti-middle class, anti-working class. I just wish they would admit it – have the courage to look into the camera and explain the agenda. What I can’t take is the network’s tagline of being “fair and balanced.”
I know what is in store for me if I watch Rachel Maddow. She is a progressive and that’s her slant. Unlike other left-leaning shows, though, she goes out of her way to have righties on her program to discuss issues.
I’m not sure how Ambrose Bierce, my personal patron saint of both cynicism and newspaper columnists, would think of Brian Williams and his situation, but I do know how Bierce defined the word “reporter” in his “The Devil’s Dictionary.” Bierce wrote a reporter is “a writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.”
Agree? Disagree? Drop me a line at news@thereminder.com or at 280 N. Main St., East Longmeadow, MA 01028. As always, this column represents the opinion of its author and not the publishers or advertisers of this newspaper.
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