Following NBC News’ Brian Williams’ recent confession that he was not aboard a U.S. military aircraft struck by enemy ground fire in Iraq in 2003, as he previously claimed, a spate of stories have appeared suggesting alternative explanations for the highly paid broadcast anchor’s conduct that don’t involve him lying or intentionally exaggerating the tale.
The array of reported theories on what led Williams to embellish his account, which he has told in varying detail since 2003, range from simple mistaken memory to a version of post-traumatic stress.
As Williams explained it, it was the “fog of memory over 12 years” that led him to claim falsely that he was aboard a U.S. military Chinook helicopter in Iraq when it received ground fire, including a rocket-propelled grenade. After a veteran who was aboard that aircraft confronted Williams on Facebook, saying, “Sorry dude, I don’t remember you being on my aircraft,” Williams backtracked, acknowledging that he was actually aboard a different aircraft that did not come under attack.
In the aftermath, Williams’ credibility has been challenged and there are questions on whether he will be forced to step down from anchoring NBC’s “Nightly News.”
Typical of the alternative explanations stories was one Friday in the New York Times that questioned whether Williams is the “victim” of his own “false memory.”
“Memories don’t live as single, complete events in one spot in the brain. Instead they exist as fragments of information, stored in different parts of our mind,” wrote reporter Tara Parker-Pope of the Times. “Over time, as the memories are retrieved, or we see news footage about the event or have conversations with others, the story can change as the mind recombines these bits of information and mistakenly stores them as memories. This process essentially creates a new version of the event that, to the storyteller, feels like the truth.”
Similarly, the Washington Post reported last week that emotions perhaps muddied Williams’ false account: “The fact is that false memories are not that uncommon, especially when they involve highly emotional events.”
Other media outlets, including PBS, the New Republic and the Los Angeles Times, posted stories citing experts who said human memory is prone to mistakes and even failure when recalling some events.
Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy, a health writer for Yahoo! News explored yet another theory: a memory tainted by trauma.
“Some insist Williams intentionally lied about being on the helicopter,” wrote Uffalussy last week. “But based on what is known in the research, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that his experience of traumatic events affected his memory. As he noted in his apology, the ‘constant viewing’ of the footage of him ‘inspecting the impact area’ could have, quite innocently, created a false memory.”
Williams has said in the past that he was “scared” while airborne in the early days of the Iraq Invasion. But he never indicated he suffered a trauma or any injury while on assignment.
It has also been reported by the Times’ Maureen Dowd and the New York Post that NBC executives and those within the news division were aware Williams was offering an erroneous account of what had actually happened in Iraq. The Post reported that “NBC News [executives] had counseled him to stop telling the tale,” thus potentially undermining the possibility that Williams was repeatedly misremembering details.
“NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography,” Dowd wrote Sunday. “They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division.”
