Posted by Jay Livingston
I don’t think Brian Williams was lying. Obviously he wasn’t telling the truth. The helicopter he was in was not hit by an RPG. But a lie is a deliberate falsehood – telling people something that you know to be untrue. Surely Williams is not so stupid as to think that he could get away with such a fabrication. He would have little to gain, and, as we are seeing, much to lose.
Instead, I think it was what Williams says it was – messed-up memory. At some point in his recalling and recounting of the incident, he swapped in someone else’s experience for his own. After all, he was in the same place, he was in a helicopter, and did talk with the soldiers whose chopper was hit. So maybe he was feeling roughly the same emotions that he imagined they felt.
Once that idea became embedded in his mind, he constructed a story that fit. And the more often he told that story, the clearer and sharper it became both as a coherent narrative and as a memory.
Robert Krulwich too is a non-print journalist. He’s worked at ABC, CBS, and NPR. Take four and a half minutes and watch this video. It’s an animated version of a “This American Life” story showing how Krulwich appropriated an anecdote that happened to his wife. He would regale friends with the anecdote, recounting it as an eyewitness, when in fact he had only heard about it second-hand from his wife. Yet he was absolutely convinced that he was there.
Should Krulwich be banned from the media? Should we distrust everything that he has ever reported?
What Krulwich and Williams did is something we all do. Forty years of research about memory has shown that memory is not a camcorder; it’s an editing program. We edit – dropping some details, altering, sharpening, and even adding others. We hit “Save,” and when we next call up the memory, we are opening not the original but the most recent edit of the file.
Unfortunately, most people still think of memory as a camcorder, and they are convinced that if someone remembers something that is not true, he must be lying and is therefore untrustworthy.* They’re wrong, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t see how Williams is going to survive this one.
----------------------
* Reaction to bad memory is not quite so simple. In this case, politics plays a part. Over on the right, the air is thick with schadenfreude over Williams’s troubles. Those same delighted folks were much more forgiving of Ronald Reagan’s memory lapses and conflation of movies with reality.
5 comments:
It seems that Brian Williams is -- no, not a camcorder -- but a lifelong chronic liar.
You're right he won't survives this... just as Dan Rather didn't survive his falsehoods at CBS News either.
bs: As I said in the post, I distinguish between deliberate falsehoods on the one and erroneous memory on the other. My guess is that it’s the latter. You are convinced that it’s the former. Your certainty apparently rests on his having lied in the past. What lies and when? I wish you had provided a link or two.
Oh, and speaking of people saying things that aren’t true, just four days ago (a short enough interval to allow for pretty good recall), you wrote here, “I'll not check in here any more.” Would you now call that a lie (it certainly was not true), and would you call the person who wrote it a liar?
On your first point, it is now being bruited about in the media that Williams has lied about other matters in his life (always falsely characterizing himself as braving danger, etc.). You can mince words (as always), but continually mis-characterizing the truth about events in your life qualifies you as being a liar.
As for your second point, my promising not to return but returning anyway, I admit to breaking my promise. As I was leaving your site (for good, I thought) I happened to see your elaborate apologia on behalf of Williams -- and then started seeing other examples of his lies being brought up around the media -- which tempted me to come back to poke fun. Should not have... and kick myself every time. It's like not being able to avert your eyes to a car wreck... when you know you should. Okay, I give you a reply to my reply (you can admit how wrong your were about Brian Williams) and then I promise not to reply or return.
ach - broke my promise in 10 minutes!
here's the latest link:
http://pagesix.com/2015/02/08/residents-debunk-brian-williams-encounter-with-christmas-bandit/
now good bye - promise
Page 6 of the Post? That’s your best source? Four people saying they doubt a story? That’s your evidence? I mean, yeah, it’s better that “bruited about.” But, to borrow a bs locution, c’mon Claude.
As for mincing words (what happened to “parsing”?), in my previous comment I asked you: was the untruth you told a lie, and was the teller of that untruth a liar? You didn’t mince, but you didn’t directly answer the question. (Also, my memory could be wrong, but I think you have in the past made similar promises to stop commenting on this blog. If so, does that make you “a lifelong chronic liar”?)
Post a Comment