#dnaEdit: News as spectacle

The National Broadcasting Company (NBC), a major broadcast network in the United States, recently suspended one of its most prominent faces, Brian Williams, for six months without pay. The NBC’s Nightly News anchor and managing editor is currently being investigated following his damning admission last week. Williams confessed that a story about his helicopter coming under fire in 2003 during the Iraq war — one that he has repeated for over a decade — was a fabrication. Through all these years, the anchor misled the public with this fabricated story, and even got away with the lie till he was finally caught out by a crew member who said he didn’t remember Williams being in his aircraft the day it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. But the Iraq incident — apparently — is not the only fabrication Williams has indulged in. The NBC’s investigations reveal that there could be many more such cases of exaggeration or simply fake narratives.

Williams has profusely apologised to the military for deliberately misrepresenting facts. But the apology does little by way of renewing public trust, specifically in the organisation, and broadly in media as an industry. That such a trusted media anchor — a veteran in the newsroom — could have blithely spun a fictitious tale raises disconcerting questions about the state of the media. Increasingly, it seems that the lines between fact and fiction are becoming blurred.

The latest media genre going by the name of ‘infotainment’, combining news with entertainment has ended up hurting the authenticity of news. In the process of ramping up the comedy/entertainment quotient of television channels, facts are treated lightly. Exaggerations are pardoned. The credibility of media as a credible instrument for disseminating news is at stake.

Here’s what Maureen Dowd observes in her New York Times column: “…TV news now is rife with cat, dog and baby videos, weather stories and narcissism … the nightly news anchors are not figures of authority. They’re part of the entertainment, branding and cross-promotion business.” In the contemporary media ambience of shrill 24x7 TV coverage, what is often presented as news turns out to be a lighter or highly dramatised account of the actual incident.

We are made to believe that consumers of news no longer want personalities like Walter Cronkite — a legendary American news presenter. Yet Cronkite followed some golden rules of good journalism which made the profession and those who practiced it — credible. He asked all war correspondents to refrain from self-aggrandisement. The first reporter to fly over the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Cronkite underplayed his personal experience. Yet his credibility among his viewers was supreme. Unfortunately, much of contemporary news is built around personalities of news anchors, many leading ones among them going to great lengths to make themselves the “story.”

The Williams episode also reveals disquieting aspects of wartime journalism and the issue of embedded journalists; some among them unquestioningly accepting the military’s version of events. The suspended NBC anchor apologised to the military because the fabricated news related to an extremely powerful institution in the US. And any rebuttals from the military are taken more seriously by media organisations than from other institutions or the public in general. Consider in this context that Williams is also believed to have fabricated some of his much prominent news reports about the Katrina floods in New Orleans. Two of his claims, of seeing a floating dead body from his hotel and encountering menacing gangs, have been under scrutiny. So will Williams now also apologise to the citizens of New Orleans or will the NBC take a public stand like it has in the case of the Iraq war reporting? Unlikely.