When Brian Williams – up until a few days ago the most successful and popular television news presenter in the United States – admitted recently that he had misrepresented events surrounding a helicopter ride into an Iraq war zone he took in 2003, I was immediately sympathetic.
I misremember stuff too, all the time. If I owe you money, I’m likely to misremember exactly how much. If I promise to meet a certain deadline, it’s not unheard of that it’ll be misremembered weeks later.
But what Williams mistakenly “remembered” were a collection of rather dashing and heroic acts – taking heavy fire in a helicopter over Iraq and being forced to crash land, for instance; or watching a dead body float by on floodwaters in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – that upon examination turned out to be fantastical and self-serving fibs.
He wasn’t on the helicopter that was fired at – the story was debunked by the crew members who were – and it was impossible to see anything floating along Katrina floodwaters from his hotel room in the French Quarter district of New Orleans because, as everyone there knows, the French Quarter was built on high ground and doesn’t flood.
The executives that run the news department at NBC had very little choice but to suspend Williams without pay – and Williams is paid an enormous amount, roughly US$10 million [Dh37m] per year to read the news, so the “without pay” part really stings – to maintain the integrity of their news operation.
But I think they’re being hypocrites.
A few years ago, a television network executive complained to me at lunch about an actor playing a lawyer on a legal drama he was supervising. I didn’t listen that hard – I was waiting for him to finish so I could complain about an actor on a comedy I was working on – but I remember the key moment.
“This guy asked for a meeting,” the executive told me, “and started complaining about the quality of the scripts. They weren’t realistic, he said. And he knew all about it because he went to law school. So it was important to him that the scripts be legally sound.”
“He had a point,” I said.
“Yeah,” said the executive, “except he didn’t go to law school. He didn’t even go to university of any kind. He didn’t know anything about the law. But I was sitting there and listening to him tell me about his law school experiences – he even mentioned his favourite professors – and he did it all so convincingly and so brazenly that it suddenly occurred to me that because this actor plays a lawyer on television he’s starting to think he’s really a lawyer.”
What we didn’t say, because we didn’t have to, was that the actor was excellent. He played the role of a lawyer really well, and if doing so required him to misremember, in a delusional and possibly insane way, actually going to law school, well, what’s the harm? It probably helped him with his close-ups.
As long as he never actually tried to represent someone in court, for money, in real life – where things like licences to practise law make very specific mentions of qualifications and experience – it shouldn’t have bothered this executive at all.
There’s not one person in the entertainment industry who doesn’t expect people of great gifts – especially actors, whose skill set can best be summarised as “Can Easily Pretend to be Someone Else” – to be a little weird and loosely connected to reality.
Of course, the actor was paid a lot of money to do exactly that. His job, after all, was Let’s Pretend. A TV news presenter, on the other hand, is supposed to hold himself to a higher standard.
Though I’m not sure why. Williams is a nice looking man with a good voice and he looks terrific in a suit. He has the ability to talk knowledgeably about a variety of important topics because for most of his workday he has a small speaker in his ear, and on the other side of that speaker are smart people whispering into a microphone the next thing he’s supposed to say.
All he has to do – aside from look unruffled and sleek – is to pretend to be a news presenter, to play to role the way his audience demands it, with assurance and eloquence and just a little dash of adventure.
When Williams “misremembered” his heroic and courageous non-experiences, he was just playing the role the best way he could.
Just as the actor, years ago on the legal drama, was absolutely convinced he had, somewhere tucked away, a law school diploma. The difference is, Brian Williams isn’t supposed to behave like a professional actor.
He had the right attitude but was in the wrong business.
But, I don’t know, he was a pretty successful news anchor. They don’t pay you $10 million if you’re not delivering the goods.
So maybe he was right about his business and we’re the ones who need to come to grips with reality, which is: all the very best actors lie.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
