Media critics across the spectrum say NBC News anchorman Brian Williams has lost credibility and speculate that his career may have sustained a fatal blow. And a few are calling for NBC News to take action after Williams’ admission that his story of braving enemy fire aboard a U.S. military aircraft was not true.
Williams apologized Wednesday for the story — which he has told, with some variations, since 2003 — on Facebook and the NBC “Nightly News.” Though he has told the story in multiple forums, Williams never reported it in his official capacity at NBC News. But media watchers say the apology is not enough.
David Zurawik, longtime media critic for the Baltimore Sun, dubbed Williams’ tale a “lie” and said he should be stripped of his position.
“If credibility means anything to NBC News, Brian Williams will no longer be managing editor and anchor of the evening newscast by the end of the day Friday,” Zurawik wrote in his column Thursday. “The admission from Williams Wednesday that he lied about being in a Chinook helicopter that was hit by enemy fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is astonishing.”
Rem Rieder, who writes on media for USA Today, expressed skepticism that Williams will emerge intact at the end of the scandal. “It’s hard to see how Williams gets past this, and how he survives as the face of NBC News,” Reid wrote.
The ambiguously worded apology Williams issued didn’t clear matters up for many critics. Williams blamed the episode on “the fog of memory over 12 years” and said he had “bungled” the story. But it remains unclear how the newsman mixed up a plane he was flying in — which did not come under fire at all — with one that was hit by enemy fire and forced down. “I spent much of the weekend thinking I’d gone crazy,” Williams wrote on Facebook Wednesday.
“When you are nailed like this, you need a forthright mea culpa, not lawyerly parsing of words,” Reider continued in his column. “But it’s doubtful even that would help, particularly now.”
“He’s a liar,” wrote New York Daily News TV critic Don Kaplan.
On Fox News, veteran media critic Howard Kurtz, who previously covered media for the Washington Post, said the episode has caused a “credibility crisis” at NBC News. “If I were running NBC, I would think that this is not a problem you can just ignore and hope will go away,” Kurtz said Thursday.
Brian Stelter, CNN correspondent and former New York Times media critic, dubbed the event “a serious blow” to Williams’ credibility.
One CNN source, however, likened Williams to her colleague Fareed Zakaria, who, despite evidence of multiple instances of plagiarism, remains an anchor at the network. “An anchor’s credibility no longer matters,” the source told the Washington Examiner media desk. “Networks look the other way when it comes to their best assets. Zakaria was found to have a record of well documented plagiarizing and nothing happened. And now Brian Williams completely fabricated a story. Let’s see if anything happens.”
