The Credibly Shrinking Man

I'm featuring Pros & Cons today because it's one of those serendipitous moments when a cartoon picks up striking, coincidental relevance in the weeks between creation and publication, though the patient doesn't actually mention being shot down in a helicopter.

Most of the Brian Williams cartoons have been meh at best. Aside from there being a few too many featuring crashing helicopters labeled "credibility" (Does nobody say to themselves, "Nah, everybody's gonna go for that one"?), they've simply shown one way or another that Williams' credibility is now to be considered faulty. 

Constant Readers will note that his credibility has not been in question here for some time. 

I'm on record as of three years ago on the overall topic of hairspray journalism, and while that one is worth going and reading, I'll give you the specific Brian Williams quote:

Who knew then that one day Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips would be begging people to log in to a web site "and tell us what YOU think," as if Jane and Stone were going to actually go through all the comments, as if anyone at NBC News really gave a rat's ass what YOU think.

And who knew, when they began doing that over at Dateline, that the infection would spread to the actual Nightly News itself, where Brian Williams now provides deathless coverage of YouTube videos you saw on Facebook a week ago.

If you want the Dave Barry quote and the J. Fred Muggs video, you're gonna have to go there yourself, but I repeated the criticism of Williams here and here and here. 

And also here, which is more explicit in saying that it all comes down to this: Not simply "form over substance" but "infotainment over news."

The quote from that one being:

With all the wars and rumors of war and ebola and financial disaster going on in the world, Brian Williams last night ate up several minutes of the NBC Nightly News interviewing Ben Affleck about almost nothing.

One has to assume that Affleck's new movie has a substantial commercial budget to spend, or that Williams has lost his mind. Possibly both.

But he's not alone in failing to advance the national dialogue.

So a cartoon declaring that Brian Williams has no credibility as a journalist hits me with about the same impact as the current flood of cartoons declaring that the people in ISIS are very, very bad. 

Or cartoons that reveal the fact that Chris Christie is rotund.

Not sure it's fair to criticize Williams if that's your level of insightful journalism.

At the dawn of television, the way you became an anchor was, well, to have built up a little heft, and, no, not the Chris Christie kind. 

At left in this photo is a chap named "Walter Cronkite" at a time when his reporting -- and that of the other journalists in the shot -- included going to Normandy in the midst of the bang-bang, not visiting it some time later as what the GIs call "a tourist."

And, you'll note in that article, Cronkite and crew were rather clear about how little they got to be in the middle of it all. No need to exaggerate when you are not the focus of the story.

I'd also point out that, while I have had a long tradition here of mocking Andy Rooney's pointless essays on "60 Minutes," he is in that article, too, and, like Bill Mauldin, was a GI who found himself assigned to cover the war rather than to fight it.

His WWII cred is unassailable and much of my dislike of his later work was that it was like watching old Joe Louis shaking hands as a greeter at a casino when you wanted to remember him at his peak.

Anyway, Brian Williams is part of the happy-talk hairspray school of journalism and, while I'm not blown away by the rather-too-straightforward approach of Bob Englehart's cartoon, he's nailed the issue squarely: When one of those pretty boys fouls up, it damages journalists who are journalists.

When feds pose as journalists to gather information on terrorist groups, it does put real reporters -- and the First Amendment's value -- in genuine danger.

But childish morons in nice suits damage day-to-day journalism. When they earn the contempt of first-responders with their inability to sort out what happened on the scene, it makes it hard for any reporter to work with cops and firefighters.

And the most scared I ever was as a reporter came when I was just trying to get quotes on a picketline. Their contempt for idiots in the media was such that I felt I was in genuine danger of either getting no story or taking a beating, until (god bless small towns) one of the strikers realized that my high-school-aged son was dating her niece and took me under her wing. 

That's not something you can count on happening very often in journalism.

Unfortunately, the promotion of telegenic airheads is.

Whatever his fate -- and it's under discussion -- what the hell difference will it make when they kick him to the curb and hire Ted Baxter/Ron Burgundy/David Gregory to take his place?

 

How the Cronkites earned their cred

And in another serendipitously related strip, The Buckets points out what it takes to create greatness.

Unfortunately, we seem to be preparing our grandchildren to be totally fantastic.

 

Editor's Note: Today's Pros & Cons also ties back to an extended discussion of memory that took place in the comments here recently. I would note the difference between a fabulist and someone who misremembers details, both in the degree of departure from fact and in whether the witnesses say, "Yes, that's what happened" or "What the hell is he talking about?"

Comments

[Jan]

Life seems to be a constant disappointment in people you thought were to be respected. Anyway, not that it matters, technically, a guy who's 71 is not a boomer. We're boomers. He missed by about 3 years.

[Mike Peterson]

Well, now HE'S gonna have to take a few days off from his job to reflect upon his credibility!