Brian Williams might not have been in a helicopter that was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. But his reputation sure took a hit.
Williams, anchor for the NBC Nightly News, recently apologized for lying about (or, possibly, misremembering) an incident that took place in 2003 when he was covering the war in Iraq, claiming that a helicopter he was riding in was hit by an RPG. Williams and the network have repeated versions of that story for a dozen years.
And it seems at first glance that the story grew more dramatic over time. In 2003, Williams says the chopper convoy he was traveling with was attacked, but doesn’t mention that his own helicopter was hit. In a report filed a bit later, Williams says that the Chinook helicopter “ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky,” making no mention of his own. But during a professional hockey game last week, Williams said that it was his helicopter that was hit.
Now Williams says that latter story was a “bungled attempt” to show appreciation for the soldiers who helped him in 2003. “I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” he said during his newscast. “I want to apologize.”
But apology or no, many now want Brian out of the anchor chair. And for me, the whole affair raises two issues that hit pretty close to home: the importance of honesty and our all-too-human knack to twist the truth—knowingly or subconsciously—for our own ends.
I was a journalist for a daily paper for several years. My value to that paper was inherently and irrevocably hooked to the trust readers placed in me. If people can’t trust reporters at a paper, then they’re not going to bother reading it. As such, lying is perhaps the worst of professional sins when it comes to journalism, because it undermines that trust.
That same ethos holds true at Plugged In, too. We’re not trying to deliver unbiased reporting, of course. But we never stick falsehoods in our reviews just to make our points seem more dramatic.
So when I hear that Williams told untruths about something that allegedly happened to him—stories that he, by definition, should know the most about—that’s pretty serious stuff. And whether he intentionally lied or twisted up the facts by way of time and repeated tellings, it’ll be hard to convince folks to place the same level of trust in him.
But you know what? I might understand what the guy was struggling with. Because just as we at Plugged In take care to tell the truth in our reviews, we also understand the value of a good story. And most of the stories we engage with are, strictly speaking, lies.
The fictional stories we watch are, of course, fabrications. The Guardians of the Galaxy is not a gritty docudrama. But the same could be said of the true stories brought to screen, too. Selma is not an exact representation of what happened in the Civil Rights marches of 1965. American Sniper is not a word-for-word retelling of Chris Kyle’s military life. We all understand this, so it’s not a big deal. The people who make these movies use real-world events to tell a story—a true story, its makers hope, but one that will mess around with the facts to better showcase the deeper truth.
And that same impulse at work in these cinematic storytellers is at work in us, too. We all want to tell a good story. We want to get to what we see as the truth. And we’ll twist the facts sometimes—and often without even knowing it—to do so. If we’re in an argument with our spouse, we’ll subtly shape the narrative to best suit our purposes. If we’re trying to entertain folks at a dinner party, we might embellish an anecdote—tell a “fish story,” if you will. And if we embellish often enough, we begin to obscure the truth even from ourselves.
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck writes about a guy named Cyrus Trask—a man who, as a buck private, marched into his first Civil War battle at 8 a.m. and had his leg shattered by shrapnel at 8:30. But the war injury gave him license to talk about the war—and boy did he talk. Writes Steinbeck:
Timidly he began to tell Alice (his wife) about his campaigns, but as his technique grew so did his battles. At the very first he knew he was lying, but it was not long before he was equally sure that every one of his stories was true. Before he entered the service he had not been much interested in warfare; now he bought every book about war, read every report, subscribed to the New York papers, studied maps. His knowledge of geography had been shaky and his information about the fighting nonexistent; now he became an authority. He knew not only the battles, movements, campaigns, but also the units involved, down to the regiments, their colonels, and where they originated. And from telling he became convinced that he had been there.
It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Misremembering an entire war? Seems outlandish. We know what we’ve done in our lives. Sure, maybe we get some details wrong. But we’d remember if we were in the battle of Gettysburg. And by the same token, we instinctively disbelieve Williams’ explanation. Of course he would know that it wasn’t his helicopter that was attacked. You don’t conflate facts like that.
Well, I tend to agree. But I’m mindful that when I retell some of my own family stories, my son will sometimes accuse me (jokingly) of lying. Truth is, I didn’t even think I was exaggerating. And so I wonder … am I misremembering my own life too? Or is my son the one misremembering? Or are we both wrong and the truth lies somewhere in the middle?
As a human being, I understand the pickle Williams is in. And as a journalist as well, I understand what a serious pickle it is. But I don’t scoff when the word misremember comes up in this conversation. We live in a fallen world, after all. And our very fallen natures make us not just prone to fail but to be fallible.
“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness,” James writes in his New Testament book. “For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.
God understands that we’re not perfect. He understands that our tongues can get us into a whole bunch of trouble. We stumble. If we didn’t, we’d be perfect, and that, as we know, is impossible.
Still, this passage suggests that teachers have a greater responsibility—and are thus judged “with greater strictness.” Maybe the Bible wasn’t just talking about God judging us, but the culture, too. After all, society places such a high trust in its “teachers.” When they let us down, we feel that breach of trust more keenly.
Williams, in his own way, is a teacher. And even though I can get my head around how and why this story might’ve been told, it doesn’t change the strict judgment he’s brought upon himself.
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