By David Wiegand on February 11, 2015 at 7:03 AM
Brian Williams. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)
NBC's decision to suspend Brian Williams for six months without pay is the network's way of saying it's serious about credibility. It's also the network's way of saying, "Hey, don't blame us. Sure we should have curbed the exaggeration a long time ago, but we're corporate suits and that means we get to demand a public lynching in order to protect our own considerably well-padded asses."
The suspension isn't tough love. It's tough scapegoating. Not that Williams is blameless: He screwed up badly with a network news anchor's most important asset– credibility. But as others have pointed out, in another time, when TV news was real news, and when actual, seasoned editors ran the network shows and paid attention to the stuff that should count, Williams would never have gotten away with his pseudo war stories for more than a decade.
TV: Brian Williams should go-- no network anchor should be that stupid
The only punishment the Kabletown suits will suffer is trying to find someone to replace Williams on a permanent basis and to patch up the embattled credibility of "The NBC Nightly News." It's hard to imagine how Williams can return after the severity of a six-month suspension, but perhaps NBC is figuring that enough time will have passed for viewers to let bygones be bygones. Bygone letting used to be a much more drawn out process, but that was then and this is now.
One of our Chronicle readers wrote in today to raise the bar on the discussion of news credibility by questioning why everyone is so lathered up about Williams' off-camera exaggeration, while Fox News goes about its own brand of right-wing selectivity of facts every night. It's a very fair question. I would also add, however, that bias is always what the other guy has. In other words, if you're a conservative who believes Obamacare is the end of civilization, you're probably not going to think Fox News is slanted.
If, on the other hand, you're a die-hard liberal, you're likely to believe every word that comes out of the mouths of Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton and Lawrence O'Donnell.
We should be concerned about bias wherever it occurs. While we can accept that talking heads like Maddow, Bill O'Reilly and others are equivalent to newspaper columnists or editorial writers, news and opinion have become dangerously conflated, especially on cable TV. It's increasingly difficult to tell where editorialize ends and news reporting begins on cable television. We should be more concerned about that.
I can't help thinking of a Biblical verse here, a bit of wisdom useful for anyone, even network suits: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Brian Williams is just a mote in the final analysis. Anyone who cares about the sorry state of TV news reporting should be focused on an especially obvious beam.