Weighing Anchor

As someone who has spent his adult life reading from a TelePrompter, and mostly his own words, I am gobsmacked by the sad parade of lies at the heart of the Brian Williams fall from grace.

I came of age in the Cronkite era and have always taken my cues from the memories of a newsman at the top of his game. It was different then. No cable distractions. No Twitterverse. No Fox News. Just the facts, soberly presented and thoroughly vetted.

Cronkite wasn't an apparent dilletante like Williams, who appeared almost as frequently on late-night talk show couches as he did at the anchor desk. Uncle Walter was a journalist first and a TV presence second. Yet he had such command of the new medium of TV news that an anecdote, widely circulated, surfaced years ago that news readers in Sweden (or was it Norway?) were nicknamed "kronkiters."  

And he will be forever linked to one of the darkest days in American history, when he announced to the nation, glasses in hand and voice cracking, that President John Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.  There was no network gloss, no screaming lower-third banners.  Just a trusted newsman unblinkingly delivering a shock to the system.

Brian Williams, by contrast, was a new-age news guru.  Extremely popular, smooth as gelato, present, pleasant, but a bit opaque.  Plucked from the ranks of local New York news anchors by no less than Tom Brokaw, Williams embodied the new generation of anchormen.  

However, I never felt he was the brains behind "The NBC Nightly News," the way Peter Jennings commanded the troops at ABC News, conducting himself like an orchestra leader, according to a network insider.  No, Williams appeared to me to be a capable communicator but less a newsman than many of his peers.  

I could imagine Cronkite setting the tone for the day, while Williams seemed more the type to walk into the newsroom and kibbitz with news managers who had already decided on the direction of the broadcasts to come.

That Williams' downfall has been traced to sloppy reporting, sentimental exaggeration and, ultimately, flights of fancy that bear no resemblance to the way things actually happened didn't surprise me.

He never received a college degree.

Then again, neither did Cronkite nor Jennings.

But in the aftermath of the investigation into Williams' journalistic path, it looks like his patented form of grandiosity was rooted in a deep-seated insecurity.  Early on, he set out to prove he was worthy of the mantle of network news star.  And the fiction he concocted became a truth he wore like a suit of armor.

His light, though, has dimmed, especially in the wake of remarks he made to Matt Lauer that skirted the apology we all expected him to deliver.  He couldn't bring himself to say the two words at the core of the controversy: "I lied."

He piled analogy upon analogy, in ways that made no sense, except to a man who still believes in the veracity of his personal narrative.  And now he gets a second chance, but to what end?

"I was not trying to mislead people," Williams told Lauer about his celebrated exaggerations.  But, he went on, "Ego got the better of me."

Fair enough.

You can't succeed in the cut-throat world of TV news without a healthy ego.  But in avoiding the obvious, a heartfelt act of contrition, Williams seems to be saying, "That's the way it is."

It had a different meaning in Cronkite's day.