The thing I find interesting is that Williams admits that he found his own writing on the matter from '08 that confirms that he was not on the bird that was hit. I guess it is possible that he put himself in the wrong bird in his own head but, to me, it seems improbable. Maybe if he had been in other choppers that were fired on in the past and just confused the two stories but I’m not aware that he has ever experienced anything similar.
A talking head on some news program brought up an interesting point. Others would have known that his story had been embellished. Certainly his family or others in the crew would have heard the true account in the past and would have told him that he was confused about being shot at. How did that not happen?
All over America this morning, irony meters shattered in a hail of devastating shrapnel, as a Fox panel examining Brian Williams’ credibility problem featured Sharyl Attkisson.
As a non-American I’m a bit confused, if the newsreader/caster isn’t a journalist and isn’t accountable for the words they read from a promter what’s the point of hearing their version of ‘the news’?
And if he isn’t a journalist what would he be doing in the helicopter in the first place?
Thompson was a deliberately unreliable narrator whose point was that all the sources and material were potentially full of shit because all these sources routinely exaggerate and fabricate. After all, he was a professional.
I haven’t read much about the whole thing but I want to note that what you are saying is absolutely plausible. I did my dissertation proposal (though not my actual dissertation later on) under* one of the foremost memory researchers in the world. Per that person’s studies, our memories are very much constructions after-the-fact. It is actually almost trivial to get people to falsely remember things in the lab just by telling them the right things in the right way. Outside the lab it happens pretty frequently too, and often just in a way which you’ve described–through hearing the right person say the right thing at the right time to make you think you remember something.
*To clarify–this person was one of the people on my committee, not my advisor.
In addition to the science mentioned above, and to my vague references to “one of the foremost memory experts in the world”, what Bricker says here should be given some credibility as well, since as a lawyer (who’s been on both the prosecuting and defending sides of cases IIRC) he has a lot of first-hand experience with the strange ways that humans can construct their memories.
This really doesn’t apply here. Williams was in a helicopter that was 20m or 30 minutes behind the one that got hit. And while one might “shift” memory to comport with a story, particularly un-extraordinary aspects of it, there is at the other end of the spectrum flat out fabrication. You don’t misremember being in a helicopter that gets shot with an RPG. Williams flat-out lied in order to increase his street creed. The fact that he did so with a fabrication having to do with the military, and in a way that people do actually die, makes it particularly distasteful. They need to give him a LONG vacation and when he comes back he belongs on a news magazine show. He’s done with “news”.
I can’t believe that he would go as far with the story as he did, including parading the retired vet at the hockey game as I mentioned earlier, knowing that his story was a lie.
I think he’s an alright news anchor. I’m an AFGN combat vet myself, if that matters, and I’d give him a pass. He hasn’t made any attempt to spin it or come up with an elaborate story to justify IMHO.
Bummer if his career ends because of something as meaningless as this.
(I want to ask again though, what did the “hockey game honored vet” think he was being honored for? He had to know it was bullshit too. His credibility is trashed more than BW IMHO)
I’m not much a fan of Brian Williams, but I certainly don’t think it’s implausible to misremember being under fire. If he’s up there and scared shitless (which one of the chopped pilots says he was, but then that guy apparently misremembered his story, too, so who knows), I think it’s pretty easy to think your copter’s been shot at when it, in fact, hasn’t. My memory does really weird shit like this to me all the time. Then again, I probably have a faultier memory than most.
You are thinking of Professor Loftus. Elizabeth Loftus - Wikipedia and what you are describing with Bricker’s long-ago courtroom and witness experience would be second-hand experience. We all have that first-hand experience. No poster, including Bricker, gets credibility for professional “experience” unless it is backed up with data, which, sigh, may include anecdotes in cases like this. For example, Bricker’s staff reports are good examples of showing the work and expertise. His assertions, such as in this thread, while generous to a fellow Beltwayer, are just his opinions, while my opposite assertions, are suspicious of the press, and in any event, both are just opinions.
He was part of the armored column that stopped and formed a perimeter around the downed helicopter and the ones that stopped with it. The column stayed while they were grounded by the sandstorm. What hockey game dude did was not particularly heroic at that moment but he did have an exemplary career. He arrived after the helicopter was hit and made the emergency landing do he would have no reason to know what helicopter Williams was in.
I can’t think of any secede up or even unsuccessful calls for a firing that came from the actual fans or consumers. It’s always from an outside group.
Kind of my thoughts, too. The idea that he’d tell such an easily-verifiable lie for such little personal gain is totally bizarre; it’s much more plausible that he misremembered, due to trauma.
That said, I can totally see if he gets fired for it. While I doubt actual impropriety, this certainly has the appearance of it, and fair or unfair, it’s going to taint the remainder of his career.
The only argument I’ve seen for this says something like “if you’re in a helicopter hit by an RPG, you’ll know it.”
But that observation is irrelevant. What would be relevant would be “If you’re not in a helicopter hit by an RPG, you’ll know it.” And that is not at all obvious, espeicially if you have never been in one hit by an RPG. Sicne you don’t know what it’s actually like, you are less likely to recognize that it’s not happening now.
Sorry a terrible comparison comes to mind but nothing better is occuring to me–lots of women aren’t sure whether they’ve ever had an orgasm or not, and some women think they have when in fact they haven’t. It would make no sense to say she must be lying because “if you’ve had an orgasm, you’ll know it.” She doesn’t know what one feels like, so she has no way to recognize that what’s happening to her now isn’t one.
I’m not saying, to be clear, that Williams, at the time, thought he’d been hit by an RPG. I’m saying he might, later, have honestly thought he remembered being hit by one, even if he hadn’t been–and “if you’ve been hit by an RPG you’ll know” is not a relevant, much less adequate, consideration against the possibility that he might have such an honest memory failure.
Guy needs to be fired. NBC works very hard to brand themselves as a reputable and trustworthy news source. One of their employees has done more damage to that brand than one person should be able to do. If I were the boss, he would be gone. The details of the exaggerations or lies are not all that important.
Sorry, I am having a lot of trouble parsing this post. I first get stuck at “We all have that first-hand experience.” What first-hand experience? Knowing the answer to that may help me understand the rest of your post.
His helicopter was not fired at, and was never anywhere near any ground fire. His original reporting of the story appears to have been at least fairly true to the facts, and is fully consistent with doing nothing more traumatic than riding in a Chinook helicopter and perhaps listening to a radio transmission of a pilot reporting ground fire.
I think NBC news would be fully justified in saying: “We expect someone in your position to have far above average skills in accurately remembering and describing past events. Yours seem to be substantially below average.”
Is it really that bad? Suppose I drive by a car accident where a victim has been decapitated. Obviously, that would be very traumatic. Could I really believe years later that a passenger in my car was decapitated?
I’ll admit my ignorance on this topic, but I can understand a witness messing up the sequence of events, believing that he actually saw something that was merely suggested to him later and things along those lines. But to believe that I actually received hostile fire in an aircraft when what actually happened was I saw the aircraft on the ground a half an hour later? It stretches belief.
JTgain, surely you know that witnesses can be persuaded that they themselves committed murders, when they actually had nothing at all to do with the murder that happened!