It is a “thing that you build slowly, over time,” according to grandiloquent promos last fall that extolled Brian Williams’s 10th anniversary as anchor of “NBC Nightly News.” Over shots of Mr. Williams talking to soldiers and small children in war zones and disaster areas, the narrator, Michael Douglas, adds, “And what you build, if you work hard enough, if you respect it, is a powerful thing called trust.”
It may take 10 years to earn it, but trust in news anchors can be shaken in less than 10 minutes.
And that’s the hard lesson of Mr. Williams’s brush with scandal for telling a tale — more than once — about being under fire in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003 that turned out not to be true. When a recent NBC news segment repeated the false version, veterans who witnessed the event complained on Facebook, and the military newspaper Stars and Stripes published an article about the fudged facts.
–
The weirdest thing about the scandal is that Mr. Williams didn’t make a journalistic blunder — as, say, the former CBS anchor Dan Rather did in 2004 with a flawed “60 Minutes” report on President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. (As a result, Mr. Rather was forced to step down as “CBS Evening News” anchor.) But these days, network newscasts are so personality-driven that the anchor’s personal life — and in Mr. William’s case, that includes his daughter’s acting career — is flaunted on the air and treated like news. And by that equation, a personal failing looms almost as large as a professional one.
Those puffy NBC promos that tout Mr. Williams’s “battle scars” and “integrity” don’t help. As one of them puts it, “You can’t see experience, but you know it when it’s there.”
