Ryan Holiday is an editor-at-large at the New York Observer, and author of Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. The title of his book alone is reason enough to make people scratch their heads, but what really makes people go “huh?” is what he said about defending the disgraced and recently suspended NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams.
Holiday’s piece, titled "The Hypocritical Degradation of Brian Williams," claims that everyone is tearing down Williams not because of ethics, but because of “jealousy, catharsis and the rage of the creative underclass.” Hmm.
The article begins by belittling Williams’s offense of serial exaggeration.
“His crime? Not corruption, not bias, not lazily reporting a critical story or outright plagiarizing it, but exaggerating and embellishing the account of his time as an embedded reporter in Iraq—you know, that war zone in the sweltering desert where everyone hates us and most of us were thankful we didn’t have to go.”
Holiday points out that no one is rushing to Brian's defense, so he would do it:
“Not only because I promise that you’ve exaggerated a story in your own life. Not only because those who have spent any time in the public eye should have an extra understanding of Mr. Williams’ predicament, because they’ve experienced the other confusing part of memory: When your own narrative is mixed with a public narrative. Cleanly separating and diligently observing the differences between the two is exhausting…”
Apparently in Holiday’s opinion, everyone lies – so why hold journalists (who are expected to be credible and unbiased) to a different standard?
Williams did exaggerate his story over the years, recalling a time when “that Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky” to “being hit by an RPG.” Holiday actually agrees with this assessment because “His recent apology and original self-suspension admit this”, but can’t believe that Williams’ other personal tales of heroism and danger are being called into question – like the time he was in a helicopter with the Israeli Defense Force and was “almost hit by a rocket” in 2006, or when reporting on Hurricane Katrina he saw dead bodies floating outside his hotel and was terrorized by gangs inside his hotel. People are even calling into question the time he was a volunteer fireman and “once” saved two puppies from a fire, then later telling another news outlet he saved a three-week old puppy from a fire.
Holiday says that people are going after Williams because they are operating under the premise that “When someone gets caught lying, it’s never the first time he or she lied.” (Straw man alert.) He also finds appalling the amount of “glee” to “take this man down.”
“It’s not enough to point out the problems with his reporting, it’s not enough to set the record straight, Brian Williams must be cashiered and humiliated in front of us in a thousand articles, Facebook posts and Internet memes.”
Holiday likens the take-down of Williams, to “acts of ritualized destruction known by anthropologists as “degradation ceremonies.”
“Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out our anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots. By the end of it the disgraced person’s status is cemented as “not one of us.” Everything about them is torn down and rewritten…”
So its society’s fault that Williams is being ridiculed and taken to the woodshed over his lies. That’s deep.
Today’s blogs, Holiday writes, are the “representatives in these degradation ceremonies.” He believes that online media isn’t capable of developing or revealing truth, rather enacting some sort of cultural catharsis, and that audiences love to “click” on the destruction and pain of others. He doesn’t think the fact that Williams lied should be the focus of the scandal, rather “…the people most loudly leading the charge are well…completely and regularly full of shit.”
Holiday believes that those who seize on “safe” targets (as with Williams) is purely for distraction of their own crimes:
“…because they think by making a lot of noise they can distract the public from the misinformation they themselves pump out on a daily basis. They commit journalistic crimes that Brian Williams would probably prefer to die than do. But by finding a scapegoat, by tearing someone else down, they hope to sate an audience they only barely respect and fear will turn on them as the real problem if not distracted.”
Holiday ends by calling blogging a “digital blood sport,” one where people take solace in the degradation of Williams and others like him, to make us “feel better by hurting others.” Or maybe the reason people are up-in-arms is because they were lied to by someone who was supposed to pride themselves on credibility and journalistic integrity. Maybe it's because people are outraged for only now seeing what others have seen for so long – that they are only getting one side of the story – one riddled with as many holes as the imaginary ones caused by the RPG that hit Williams’ helicopter.
