How did it happen? And why?
How could a respected newsman like Brian Williams get caught up in a veritable web of lies? And why would he even go down such a road?
It would seem to be beyond belief -- impossible.
But when you look more closely and you consider the makeup and the nature of our popular culture, it becomes more understandable.
So, let's try to explain the Brian Williams saga:
1) Journalism ain't journalism anymore. In the early days of TV news reporting the news telecast "stars" were the sort of guys who had a face for radio. Pioneers of TV news came up through print journalism and then radio. Their background was the written word. They wrote their own copy and delivered news that grew from print stories. They were oriented toward hard, breaking news: The headlines, the key facts at the top of the story, the details. The "who, what, when, where and why" were important to them. Time permitting, they also dove into the "how." They wouldn't know a "lifestyle" or a "trend" story if they tripped over it. This era was defined by people like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. These are the people who invented the electronic gathering and dissemination of news and information.
2) News has now been corrupted. Today, news and the popular culture are so blended that any dividing line between the two seems to have disappeared. The separation of hard news from frivolous matter is virtually non-existent. When Bruce Jenner's "transformation" becomes Big News (even in what were once traditional journalistic circles) then, differentiating solid news and information from fringe antics becomes near impossible. Now, the noise is the news. And it's pretty much all noise all the time.
3) News and fiction and opinion have merged. When New York magazine pioneered the "new journalism" in the 1960s and 70s, news, opinion, lifestyles and advocacy came together in a kind of spicy minestrone that readers couldn't get enough of. It was juicy. It was gossipy. It was entertaining. But it wasn't always news and it wasn't always completely credible. Still, it prevailed. And its style and approach seeped into even the most rigidly traditional newsrooms. Step by step, page by page, word by word, story by story, perception became more important than reality. What the writer or reporter wanted you to hear or see or feel regarding what happened triumphed over what actually happened. Indeed, what you felt became more important than what you thought as emotion trumped reason.
4) Instantenousness diluted the news. The faster news came at us, the less meaningful and reliable it became. News on the fly became news imbedded in a lie -- the lie that fast equaled factual, credible, real. The rush to disseminate overwhelmed the responsibility to discriminate. In a tsunami of images, words, sounds and presumed facts, all information became equal. Consequently, it was rendered meaningless. And it left us numb. So, we needed greater doses of the cocaine of shock, entertainment, razzle-dazzle and even grizzly morbity to keep us coming back.
5) Brian Williams came to epitomize this. He's now the Poster Boy for the Death of News. Williams, who never graduated college and never worked on a newspaper, came up entirely through TV news in the post-Cronkite era. He began on a TV station in Pittsburgh in 1981 and in little more than a decade he was anchoring a national TV news broadcast. As ratings became the ultimate goal in TV news, Williams became the pretty face that paid dividends. And Williams delighted in it. Unlike newsmen of yesteryear, he relished being a public personality. A sort of pop culture phenom, he willingly shilled for NBC and, every chance he got, hyped the news. He became a regular on the speaking circuit, appeared on late night talk shows, hosted a TV magazine, joked with comedian-as-newsman Jon Stewart, appeared as a caricature of himself on 30 Rock and clowned around on Saturday Night Live. Along the way of course, Williams embellished tall tales about himself and his adventures as a journalist and Big Somebody. The transformation was now complete.
Information suffocation. The coarsening of the culture. Opinion overload. Faux journalism. All these converged as Williams rose higher and higher. Today, he appears to be the latest victim of a troubling new reality that he himself helped create.
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