Journalistic Integrity: Brian Williams In The Washington Post

Journalistic integrity is often a foregone conclusion, and since a person is sitting behind a desk it comes naturally for the public to trust that figure without too much skepticism. Unfortunately for any news show host, their work is going to be heavily scrutinized going forward following the Brian Williams saga. At the beginning of February the news surfaced that Brian Williams may have exaggerated certain details about a trip to Iraq in 2003 while covering the war. When this story expanded and other lies and exaggerations became exposed, it was clear that Williams’ career could be in jeopardy and the entire NBC news department could lose all credibility. While Williams’ attempted to apologize and regain his credibility on the evening broadcast,

While this coverage is informative and far from polarizing, it includes too much “he said, she said” reporting in which the quotes and statements about Brian Williams’ downfall are simply reported and left to be inferred. For example, the Washington Post uses passive language when referencing a controversial claim made by a source by saying “some speculate” and “others suggest” when talking about Williams’ motivation for fudging the truth (AP 2015). In addition, the Washington Post presents both angles of the story without picking a side. In one article they say that “comeback stories are popular” which would imply that they are rooting for Williams, except for the sentence following that claims that another popular type of story “are stories about the downfall of powerful people” (Washington Post

This back and forth of presenting a claim and counter claim without taking a side informs the reader about the situation, but comes far from holding anybody accountable. Also, this view from nowhere makes it unclear as to what they think will happen. This view from nowhere can also be described as “false balance” which means that reporters would provide false equivalency to a certain side of the argument regardless of what the evidence proves. The Post even claims that “puffing up one’s experiences…is something that everyone does for myriad reasons” in addition to the claiming that the “Williams debacle is a classic example of people using counterfeit credentials to demonstrate their relevancy and to spin their own personal narrative in order to stay in the limelight,” (AP 2015). Both of these claims are what appear to be a half-hearted attempts to admonish Williams of his misdoings and shift the blame not to NBC, but to human nature. The false balance found in the Washington Post’s reporting of this story does not hold people accountable, reports both sides while refusing to pick one, and tries to make excuses for those that do not deserve