Brian Williams Scandal

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Brian Williams is a newscaster and was formerly the anchor on the “Nightly News” which aired on NBC. He began his career in broadcasting in 1981 working for a news station in Kansas, shortly after he moved to New York City to work for WCBS. In 1993, Williams won his first Emmy for a report he did on the stock market collapse which gained him his position at NBC. At NBC, Williams started out as a White House correspondent. In 1996, he graduated from correspondent to anchor of CNBC and MSNBC on the show “The News with Brian Williams.” Then in 2004, Williams took over as anchor NBC’s leading show the “Nightly News,” which was hosted by Tom Brokaw for 23 years (Biography.com Editors, 2015). In February of 2015, Williams admitted to embellishing …show more content…

Rather than trying to cover up the Williams scandal, NBC had senior executive producer, Richard Esposito, leading the investigation of Williams. Farhi wrote in The Washington Post (April 2015) that Esposito found that Williams had fabricated eleven stories. These stories included Williams’ time in Egypt when he was covering the Arab Spring as well as his time in New Orleans when he was covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as stated by Kieran Corcoran of the Daily Mail. Initially, NBC was not sure if they were going to release Esposito’s findings, however, in doing so they have demonstrated that they value their credibility and transparency. According to Vanity Fair (2015), a group of NBC executives reviewed Esposito’s findings and decided that it would be impossible to keep Williams on at NBC and dismiss his actions. They suspended him because it was the right thing to do to protect NBC’s credibility as a news outlet rather than “categorically deny and prove wrong all of these [accusations]” (Burrough, April …show more content…

According to the SPJ Code of Ethics, a journalist should “never deliberately distort facts or context” (2014). Williams did this on multiple occasions throughout his career with NBC. However, he had a difficult time accepting all of the blame and wrote if off as forgetting what really happened or having something wrong with his brain, according to Bryan Burrough of Vanity Fair (2015). The apology that he released also underwent public scrutiny. SPJ says that journalists should acknowledge their mistakes, correct them quickly, and explain themselves carefully and clearly which Williams failed to do (2014). Burrough wrote in his article that the apology made by Williams only made the situation worse (2015). He did not accept responsibility for lying rather he spoke as if he could justify his actions by trying to honor a veteran. The Vanity Fair articles attributes Williams’ less than thoughtful apology to a lack of help from NBC executives to form an appropriate apology. While his apology was not the best, it was still released in a timely fashion. According to the SPJ Code of Ethics journalists should “respond quickly to questions about accuracy” (2014). Williams did so when he wrote his initial response and apology to soldiers on Facebook and when he apologized on air. Once his lies were made public he did not deny anything which is better than trying

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