A TV newsman’s only currency — beyond his baritone delivery, his perfect hair and his plumb-square teeth — is his credibility, the presumption that when he tells you something, it’s more or less the truth.
And Brian Williams’ tale of being aboard a helicopter that was strafed by rocket-propelled grenades in 2003, when the NBC News anchor was covering the American invasion of Iraq, was, more or less, not true. He has told the story several times over the years, including last week during a tribute to a retired soldier during a New York Rangers hockey game, but on Wednesday evening, he recanted the story after pushback from Stars and Stripes military newspaper and from 159th Aviation Regiment crew members.
The truth, Mr. Williams now says, is that he was actually aboard a helicopter that arrived on scene perhaps an hour after a separate Chinook helicopter had been damaged by enemy fire, and forced to land. He inspected the damaged chopper — but he had not been riding in it.
“I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” Mr. Williams said during his “NBC Nightly News” Wednesday broadcast. “It did not take long to hear from some brave men and women in the air crews who were also in that desert. I want to apologize.”
He also apologized before NBC news division staffers on Friday afternoon.
The only one who knows for certain if Mr. Williams was embellishing or simply misremembering is Mr. Williams himself — and perhaps his pilot, Rich Krell, who told CNN on Thursday that Mr. Williams’ helicopter, and the cargo it was carrying, were hit by small-arms fire. But Mr. Krell added that “some of things he’s said are not true.”
Then on Friday morning, in a text to CNN reporter Brian Stelter, Mr. Krell seemed to question his own account after other helicopter pilots told The New York Times that they had piloted Mr. Williams’ helicopter and did not recall their convoy coming under fire.
“The information I gave you was true based on my memories, but at this point I am questioning my memories,” Mr. Krell said, according to CNN.
NBC News President Deborah Turness said Friday that an internal investigation is underway. “We have a team dedicated to gathering the facts to help us make sense of all that has happened,” she said.
The controversy has extended to Mr. Williams’ reporting in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2006. An NBC news executive said possible contradictions that have surfaced in that coverage will be examined as well.
If the investigation demonstrates a pattern of Mr. Williams straying from the facts, his job could be in jeopardy, the executive said.
For a journalist — someone whose job description includes catching politicians and others in the lies they tell — it’s a damaging mistake, no matter its provenance, and it’s hard to fathom that someone could “misremember” whether their helicopter was hit by a grenade, then forced to crash land in the desert.
Yet psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, in their book “Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me,” note that, for most of us, the memory is a fantastically unreliable thing. And once the memory bungles a story, the brain employs a variety of safety nets and back-up mechanisms to make sure that we continue to believe our own lies.
To illustrate, they use the example of another trusted newsman, and Mr. Williams’s predecessor, Tom Brokaw. Mr. Brokaw, after being elevated to the Nightly News anchor desk, was asked by Time magazine about his most difficult interview. He mentioned an interview he’d done with Gore Vidal, the late writer and intellectual, back when Mr. Brokaw was one of the hosts of the “Today” show: “I wanted to talk politics, and he wanted to talk about bisexuality,” Mr. Brokaw said.
In fact, the exact opposite had happened, they wrote in “Mistakes Were Made”:
Mr. Brokaw started by saying, “You’ve written a lot about bisexuality ...” but Vidal cut him off, saying, “Tom, let me tell you about these morning shows. It’s too early to talk about sex. Nobody wants to hear about it at this hour, or if they do, they are doing it. Don’t bring it up.” “Yeah, uh, but Gore, uh, you have written a lot about bisex...” Vidal interrupted, saying that his new book had nothing to do with bisexuality and he’d rather talk about politics. Mr. Brokaw tried once more, and Vidal again declined, saying, “Now let’s talk about Carter.”
So was Mr. Brokaw lying about the Vidal interview? Not exactly, Ms. Tavris and Mr. Aronson write: “Most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. ... All of us, as we tell our stories, add details and omit inconvenient facts; we give the tale a small, self-enhancing spin; that spin goes over so well that the next time we add a slightly more dramatic embellishment — [until] what we remember may not have happened that way, or even may not have happened at all.”
“We do that all the time,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist and University of California-Irvine social ecology professor who has studied false memory for 40 years. “That’s called ‘audience tuning.’ You tweak the story to make yourself look a little better.”
It’s also possible that Mr. Williams was not caught in a lie: that he, in fact, misremembered. Those throwing stones at him do so armed with the presumption that no one could possibly misremember such a harrowing life event. And because we assume we would never misremember such an event, it follows that Mr. Williams wouldn’t either, and that he must have lied.
That’s a flimsy armor, even though most of us believe it — and we believe it, because the alternative violates our own intuitions, and would be an admission that much of what we recall of our own lives is possibly untrue, or at least unreliably filtered. That filter catches certain bits, and throws out others, and that selective memory is abetted by the passage of time.
And it doesn’t always require 12 years’ time. Charles Brainerd, a professor of human development at Cornell University, calls this phenomenon “fade to gist.” After a poker game, for example, you might soon forget your exact hand or how much you won, but you’ll remember the overall fun evening.
“What happens in everyday life is that we store two kinds of memories,” he said. “We store memories for the actual event themselves. And we also store the gist of our experience.” It’s the gist that survives, and it’s the gist that we call upon when reconstructing events months or years later.
And while Mr. Williams’ account of the helicopter ride may have shifted on the margins, it was always consistent with the gist. “War, danger, shooting ... They were grounded for a couple of nights in the desert. That’s the gist of the situation,” Mr. Brainerd said.
What accounts for that fade-to-gist? Much of it is hard-wired — our memories are not flash drives, and are not designed to work like one. “Each time we remember something, we are reconstructing the event, reassembling it from traces throughout the brain,” writes Ken Eisold, a psychoanalyst from New York. “As a result, memory is unreliable. We could also say it is adaptive, reshaping itself to accommodate the new situations we find ourselves facing. Either way, we have to face the fact that it is ‘flexible.’ ”
It’s more than flexible — it can adopt others’ memories as their own, or fabricate memories from whole cloth. Ms. Loftus calls these “rich false memories,” or recollections that are vivid and detailed, yet, in the end, untrue. “We’re all susceptible, basically, to having our memories being contaminated,” even if we’d all like to think otherwise, she said.
First Published: February 6, 2015, 1:00 p.m.
