There’s at least one powerful irony in NBC slamming Brian Williams with a six-month, unpaid suspension and Jon Stewart announcing his retirement from “The Daily Show” on the same day. And it’s within this question: Which of the two has proven to be the more credible messenger of news? After that you can kick around, “Which is more the caricature of a modern TV news anchor?”
There’s almost nothing more than anyone can say about Williams’ death spiral other than it was whiplash fast and unambiguous. One day he was a celebrity god. The next he’s persona non grata among the chattering classes. But in the brief time it took him to dive from the stratosphere to the asphalt, precious few bloviators and pundits dared place his personal apocalypse in the context it thoroughly and fairly requires.
Quite ironically, Stewart himself got there Monday night. Elsewhere, veteran reporter/writer John Hockenberry, squeezed it in at the end of his column on Williams’ meltdown. I was a bit disappointed that my old pal, David Carr, while eloquent, couldn’t find space to make the same salient point. (Off the radar, another old pal, Jim Leinfelder was on to this question — via e-mail –within hours of Williams’ meltdown.)
“The point” is of course this: If a guy who is basically a network entertainer — someone whose combination of good-looks, charm and polished demeanor reliably attracts an audience large enough to satisfy advertisers — is to suffer the 21st century of a public drawing-and-quartering for over-inflating his war experiences, specifically those in our Iraq invasion, how is it that both the architects of that invasion and Williams’ peers feel no heat? No widespread vilification? Much less legal recourse? Fundamentally no censure or punishment at all for leading us into a multi-trillion-dollar, reputation-blotting blunder and, in the context of the media, playing complicit lapdogs to the whole shameful affair?
Are Williams’ cocktail party-style exaggerations truly worse than the timidity of the vast majority of the national press? Worse than the professional skeptics who stood by, too intimidated by national hysteria to ask impertinent questions, as Dick Cheney and George W*. sold a war of choice based on stovepiped intelligence and fear? It certainly seems so, because Williams’ career is a cinder, while the rest, including the revered Tom Brokaw, are still welcome guests at think-y festivals, graduation ceremonies and Big League journalism award ceremony stroke-a-thons.
Watching Stewart walk us through this Monday night, the most sickening part for me, wasn’t Williams, it was the montage of people like former New York Times editor Bill Keller and his laurel-covered ilk uttering flagrantly false assurances of having done due diligence on the war at its outset. That is the sort of thing, a transparent falsehood, that ought to ruin a career, not something as minor on the grand scale of things as bragging about getting “shot out of the sky.”
Back to the question of credibility. If we truly mean “being trusted and believed in”, is Jon Stewart further down the ladder of trustworthiness than any of the correspondents who, dare I say, “questioned” George W* about the looming invasion on March 6, 2003? (Here’s video.) The record pretty clearly shows that only ABC’s Terry Moran came close to applying any heat to the veracity of the claims Cheney and Bush had been making. Everyone else was caught up in the fog of research-tested patriotism. You have to wonder how someone who hadn’t completely bought in to the group-think of corporate journalism might have approached Bush at that critical moment?
Stewart’s “fake anchor” shtick has made TV history by making “real journalists” squirm over their pettiness, ineptitude, bluster and lack of respect for the truth, all of which is course is baked into the notion of a commercially palatable news product.
So as both Williams and Stewart depart the stage, it is fair to ask, “Which of the two is more credible?” “Which is most respectful of the truth?”
The hard bigotry of high expectations. Williams’s fall came shortly after FOX felt one of its lies — repeated by several on-air types — was bad enough that it had to correct it. But NOBODY at FOX is on suspension, because nobody expects FOX to get it right*. Williams’s fall seems exaggerated by the fact that people expect better of him. That, and our general American tendency toward self-fulfilling Schadenfreude — elevating people beyond reason, and be outraged that they fail to meet our expectations.
Williams is destroyed for telling a fish story — but Jenny McCarthy is still widely considered an expert on parenting, vaccines and autism.
*If you haven’t had your cognitive dissonance fix for the month, noodle this idea: FOX has an audience that believes, often passionately, that they are watching the only channel where they can get the real truth — but is not outraged when they find out they’ve been told, often passionately, lies.
I don’t think the contest is between Stewart and Williams; I think it’s between Stewart (and Colbert) and the rest of the media, which Stewart skewered, as you noted, for their lap-dog trust in the purveyors of war. This is the media that failed to accurately report the reality behind events for at least the past 50 years — events like the U.S.’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s Allende, the U.S. support of the right-wing death squads in Argentina in the 80s, the true nature of the conflict behind Tiananmen Square, and the failures of officials running the Green Zone.
If Williams represents anything for me, right now, it is the carnivory of the established media people when they smell a little blood. Truly, his sin, if it is even that, pales in comparison to their dutiful upholding of the status-quo power dynamics of this nation.
I wonder how Stewart and his writers learned all the facts they used in their bits?