If the truth be told, The Scrapbook has been relatively unengaged by the Brian Williams crisis. Yes, the revelation that Williams is a serial fabricator—inventing details about wartime exploits and brushes with death—is a problem for his employer, NBC News. Its earnest, upright corporate face has become a national laughingstock, and NBC probably had no choice but to pull him off the air.
But for a week, for six months, forever? The Scrapbook neither knows nor cares. There are two reasons for this. First, all the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending on the subject seems to have missed a larger point: namely, that in the modern media environment, the credibility, integrity, and all-round trustworthiness of NBC’s evening news reader is largely an irrelevance.
The fabled anchormen of yesteryear—John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite, Max Robinson, Frank Reynolds, etc.—were no better or worse than the square-jawed, baritone-voiced Williams. In the pre-Internet age, however, they wielded more influence. The rise of an alternate journalistic universe, and decline of the Big Three television networks, put an end to all that. The tortured succession to Walter Cronkite at CBS (1981), and the internecine sniping between Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner on ABC (1976-78), seem quaint, almost comic, in retrospect.
The other point is less obvious. The great mystery surrounding Brian Williams’s fabrications—he seems enamored of the idea of flying under fire in helicopters—is not how or when, but why? Nobody really expects a news reader to dodge bullets or wade through floodwaters; and in any case, Williams gets credit for broadcasting from war zones and other uncomfortable places. He must have known that others were aware of the truth of these incidents, or that telling tall tales on the Late Show with David Letterman would expose him to scrutiny.
The parallel with celebrity plagiarists—Molly Ivins, Fareed Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, et al.—is unmistakable: Such open theft, such compulsive dishonesty, can lead only to public exposure and embarrassment. This is not a problem for media analysts or network executives, but a question that may best be answered by psychiatrists.
