NEW YORK, NY Feb. 9 (DPI) – He’s taking some time off, hoping it will all blow over, but Brian Williams seems unlikely to restore the trust he needs with viewers to keep his job. That’s based on the current temperature of reader comments and press pundits alike — most of whom seem to like Williams but think his exaggerations are too much for him to overcome.
Moreover, the rest of the media suggest the network anchor’s high profile as a talk-show-guest regular makes him more vulnerable to backlash.
The New York Times’s David Carr wrote today:
As the evening news anchor, Mr. Williams possesses a rare combination of fame and trust, with each feeding off the other. But fame is slippery, morphing into infamy very quickly, as Mr. Williams discovered in four days of sustained pounding. Everyone loves a story about seeing the mighty fall, even if they are as fundamentally likable as Mr. Williams.
Readers across the internet seemed to want to be forgiving, but the Most Recommended post – among more than 2200 comments attached to last week’s main NYT story on the Williams episode – reflected a real anger about hearing stories from a trusted news source, stories that are peddled as true but aren’t:
I remember the time my F-16 got shot down over Mosul. The plane exploded in mid-air, just as my ejector seat activated. Luckily, I parachuted safely to the ground, only to be attacked by a brigade of Iraqi commandos. After shooting the first 9 (one bullet each, thank you), my gun jammed, and I had to subdue the remaining 35 men with my left hand (my right arm broke when the plane was hit by a heat-seeking missile). In the end, I killed them all, and then made my way home to Mom, and my faithful dog, America…
Oh, wait. Sorry, that never happened. I must have conflated that with the time my Lexus hit a pothole on the FDR, and I had to wait 40 minutes for AAA.