The End of Accountability (For Some)
We know Jill Abramson will survive her scandal, because Brian Williams somehow survived his.
By Aaron Timms
A week after it emerged that former New York Times editor Jill Abramson plagiarized several journalists in her new book, Merchants of Truth, one of them, Jake Malooley, interviewed her for Rolling Stone. Midway through the interview Abramson introduced a curious distinction: A “number of respected eminent scholars,” she explained, have assured her that the attribution omissions in Merchants of Truth were “venial” but not “venal.” The former is taken from the lexicon of religion, and denotes sins that are done without malice, and are thus minor, if not trivial.
Breaches of journalistic ethics are apparently now subject to tests of intention, and we should all be thankful that Abramson and her eminent and unnamed scholarly pals will be around to guide us through the tough venial-versus-venal calls we’re sure to encounter in the years to come. And make no mistake: Abramson will be around. She’s not going anywhere. Perhaps the most illuminating exchange in Malooley’s interview with Abramson — a jewel box of evasions, equivocations and bizarre, legalistic distinctions that previously held no place within discussions of journalistic practice — was when he asked whether she was worried, given the controversy surrounding Merchants of Truth, about finding work as a journalist again. “No,” she answered. She did not elaborate.
The confidence behind this answer is not hard to comprehend. Where plagiarism and fabrication once killed journalism careers, for a certain inhabitant of the media elite, they’re now mere bumps on the road of lifetime employment. The cardinal sins of yesterday are for them diluted into mere “mistakes,” “missteps,” “errors of judgment” and “omissions.” All regrettable, all correctible, all forgivable — but none of them all that different, in substance, to the crimes that have gotten less-famous journalists banished from the realm. Standards have eroded, dignity has slipped. How Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair must wish to have lived in these softer, weaker times, when a routine apology tour and some mealy expressions of regret are enough to secure absolution for once-capital crimes.
The notes Abramson has struck in her defense — owning up to the crimebut rejecting the accusationof intent, refusing to call a stolen spade a stolen spade — have been reminiscent of another media captain hoisted with his own petard in recent years: NBC anchor Brian Williams. Williams pioneered the road to redemption for big beasts of the media elite tripped up by the sloppiness of their own work. His rehabilitation offers a fair guide to what the future likely holds for Abramson: a brief, slightly embarrassed interlude in the shadows, followed by untroubled years of continuous work. The echoes between Williams and Abramson serve a second purpose: They remind us how bizarre it is that Williams still has a job in journalism.
Williams’s ongoing employment is, without exaggeration, one of the great mysteries of modern media. What Abramson did was bad, unforgivable for someone who’s occupied such high journalistic office — or for any journalist, really. But what Williams did was far, far worse. Over years, as he built his career as the trusted-yet-down-with-the-kids heir to Tom Brokaw’s throne, Williams repeatedly fabricated facts and stories and presented them as real. NBC’s internal investigation in 2015 found no less than 11 instances of fabrication, though the true number may be higher. Williams claimed his helicopter had been shot at while flying over Iraq, when in fact it was the helicopter in front of his that had come under fire. He said he was in Berlin for the fall of the Wall, when in fact he got there a day later. He claimed that he saw government militias on horseback beating anti-government protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, and that he witnessed looting and dead bodies floating in the water around New Orleans’s French Quarter during Hurricane Katrina — all similarly questionable. These were not minor omissions. Nor were they one-time lapses. Williams told the stories over and over in public, reveling in their tension and heroism and embroidering them with the flourishes of a master dissembler.
The lies got more baroque, more ridiculous with time. In 2013, on the tenth anniversary of his infamous Iraqi helicopter ride, Williams regaled David Letterman with a battery of artificially precise details about the escapade (“Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in — RPGs and AK47s. We were at a hundred feet doing a hundred forward knots.”) His commitment to these lies was total, almost sociopathic. By the time he was found out, they had not simply become an ornament to his brand as an intrepid, unflappable reporter, the dapper cosmopolitan who was also a nerveless man of action — they were the brand. And they were all utter bullshit.
Abramson passed others’ words off as her own. Williams invented whole characters and scenes and events that never took place, all while continuing to hold himself out as a reporter of the truth. His reward for this remorseless breach of the public’s faith? Six months in the doghouse followed by a return to an (admittedly diminished) anchor’s chair on MSNBC. Years of outright fabulation might have destroyed lesser journalistic careers, but not our Brian. Not for him the ostracism of a Glass or a Jonah Lehrer, those junior burgers thrown to the flames. Instead, every weeknight on MSNBC, you’ll now find Williams beaming into America’s homes at the helm of The 11th Hour with familiar glee, shoulder dropped, brow furrowed into that old triangle of sententiousness, the signal that we are here, once again, among purveyors of Serious News.
Nothing about the routine has changed. The stentorian newscaster monotone, the lock-jawed statements of the obvious, the self-loving attempts at wit, the long and obsequious wrap-ups after every interview that position him, Brian Williams, the man who made himself the hero of stories that never even happened, as the arbiter of journalistic excellence. It would be tempting to say that Williams, following his 2015 career hiccup, is well and truly back on his bullshit. But the truth is he never really left it.
It’s instructive to re-watch the interview Williams conducted with Matt Lauer — how times have and have not changed — when his six-month suspension came to an end in June of 2015. What’s striking is how similar the excuses Williams offered then are to those put forward by Abramson today, especially over the allegedly exculpating matter of intent. “I was not trying to mislead people,” Williams said. “I said things that weren’t true,” he admitted, while point-blank refusing to concede that he had lied. In a similar vein, Abramson has squealed that passing another writer’s words off as your own without attribution, which almost everyone on the planet calls “plagiarism,” was in her case not plagiarism but some obscure malfunction of footnoting protocol. The arrogance is so astonishing it’s almost admirable. There are no consequences for those at the top. This was always the case, probably, in journalism at least, but together these two cases now offer a blueprint for tomorrow’s disgraced former leaders of media to plot a path back to respectability: apologize, don’t own up to the thing you did, then continue as before.
And what is it for, all this dissimulating and dodging? So that Williams can take the seat and Abramson hog the bylines that might otherwise go to younger, more ethical, more deserving reporters. The media’s Boomer elites know no shame.
It’s well documented that Williams and NBC News chief Andy Lack are close. Lack, so the story goes, protected Williams and prepared the ground for his return in 2015 even as others within NBC pushed for his ouster. Lack himself has endured a torrid time of late, coming under fire — in Brian Williams’s version of this story, the fire came from RPGs and AK47s — for everything from the calamitous hiring of Megyn Kelly to NBC’s endemic culture of sexual harassment. Yet he and Williams continue to thrive — just as, no doubt, Abramson will once this bothersome little affair blows over. What legitimacy can the media have in decrying the lies and factual misdemeanors of Donald Trump or any other politician when the industry itself continues to reward proven liars?
If we value truth and ethics in reporting, Williams and Abramson should be out of jobs, and never work in journalism again. But the omertà of the media elites has made truth a wasting commodity. News was fake well before it became “fake news.” Next time a member of the media raises the now-customary caterwaul about the death of truth, remember who set the assassination in motion.
Aaron Timms is a freelance journalist. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Baffler, the Daily Beast, and many others.
Production DetailsV. 1.0.2
Last edited: February 23, 2019
Author: Aaron Timms
Editor: Alexander Zaitchik
Illustration: NBC Nightly News
