Every journalist is familiar with the type of story that is “too good to check”. It is a warning label on tales that beg to be true but probably aren’t. In the pre-social-media era, an incorrect story, and sometimes an outright lie, might have sat hidden in plain sight for months or even years. Spectacular fabrications such as those of the New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was discovered in 2003 to have fabricated or plagiarised elements of dozens of stories, rocked venerable institutions to their core. Last week the US news establishment took another torpedo to its hull.
Brian Williams, the host of NBC’s Nightly News, was suspended last week for six months with no pay, after a military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, published a story where Williams admitted he had exaggerated a story about flying in a helicopter that came under fire in Iraq. The incident in 2003 happened when Williams was, in fact, following a helicopter that was struck by missile fire, but in retellings he shifted to a position where not only had his helicopter had been hit, but the US crew “figured out how to land safely”. It just wasn’t true. To make matters worse for NBC news executives, Williams posted a rather mealy-mouthed apology on Facebook without any of them knowing.
By the end of the week everything Williams had said or done in his long, gilded career was under scrutiny. A sort of reverse Zelig, Williams disappeared from momentous scenes he had claimed to have participated in. He was not at the fall of the Berlin Wall as once noted (he arrived a day later), or flying into Baghdad with Seal Team 6 at the start of the war. Small exaggerations blown up under the magnifying glass of collective scrutiny. This was the digital undoing of the most analogue of practices, telling stories on behalf of others for remote audiences. Williams represents an era where one witness stood for many, and ironically lost his status at the point where it probably mattered least.
Related: Is NBC firing Brian Williams, or just humiliating him?
His iteration of the truth is so easy to compare and check over time through a digital archive that it is almost embarrassing to read the shift in narrative. Stars and Stripes would once have addressed just a small audience of military personnel, but now it has as much potential reach as NBC itself. To compound the error with a hasty and undercooked post on Facebook put the digital tin hat on the whole sorry episode.
It is highly unlikely that Williams will be allowed back on the air as the anchor of the flagship news programme, and quite possible that collateral damage will remove other producers or executives from the network.
It is a great paradox of the rise of the web as a platform for news consumption, that we have an accelerated cycle of both false stories and rumour and the ability to examine and debunk them within one system. Last week the journalist Craig Silverman released a report called Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content (disclosure – I am the director of the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School, which published the report). Silverman collected and analysed more than 1,600 “false rumours” and examined how news organisations often proliferate false information but are less engaged in stopping and correcting its viral spread.
The conflation of information and entertainment has grown the business but diminished the reputation of journalism
He wrote in the report: “A source of tension between chasing clicks and establishing credibility is the abundance of unverified, half-true, unsourced or otherwise unclear information … It’s a result of the holy trinity of widespread internet access, the explosion of social networks and the massive market penetration of smartphones.”
What we know from the Williams case, and many others, is that this tension is not new. It forms part of the conflation of information and entertainment that has grown the business but diminished the reputation of journalism over time. Media organisations that base their digital growth on news are balancing requirements for traffic growth with that of their brand.
Some are unlucky, or careless and tripped up by the deliberately deceitful; others know that the gloss on the story is too shiny but don’t do much to buff it down. And some are happy to let oversight slide for the sake of the ratings and the money they make.
Williams is now a business liability and that is why he won’t be back in that role. The system that tolerated this economy with the truth is more tenacious. Whether it is the entirely incorrect but essentially unimportant stories such as a woman having a third breast added or Durex launching pumpkin spice condoms, or more serious but untrue stories such as the discovery of the mass grave of Mexican students, “false news” is finding new forms and spreading more often than it is corrected. Williams represents an anchorman era that is over. The era of manipulating attention with deceptive information is worryingly getting a new lease of life.