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Cross-Cultural Psychology
Brian Williams, Journalism, and Celebrity Culture
NBC anchor's downfall shows how mixing news and celebrity can be toxic
Posted March 25, 2015
Remember Brian Williams?
He was removed as the face of NBC News last month, but the dilemma his story poses for journalism is only going to get more difficult.
The veteran news anchor, of course, was removed from the air after he apologized for “misremembering” his experience in Iraq in 2003. He said he was aboard a U.S. military helicopter that had to make an emergency landing after coming under small arms fire. In fact, he was never shot at; he was on another helicopter that arrived at the downed craft shortly afterward.
The scandal created a whirlwind of speculation – about Williams’ motives, about what NBC should do about his claims, about the continued erosion of journalism in general. But while Williams continues his six-month exile, it is particularly important to consider a couple of lessons.
The first is that Williams’ story should be read as a cautionary tale for all journalism educators, aspiring journalists, or those building their careers now. Everyone, of course, should know that accuracy is paramount, and that credibility in news is as fragile as it is essential. What his story reminds us of is the malleability of memory. It is notoriously unreliable and vulnerable to distortions. We commit memory error and even fall victim to false memories in all kinds of ways, cognitive research tells us. Among the most common errors is when we combine pieces of our experience with knowledge of another, similar event that we didn’t experience. “There’s a large literature that shows that memory is prone to error and distortion,” said Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor who has written extensively on memory and memory errors. “We sometimes have high confidence in things that didn’t occur exactly in the way that we remember them.” (Mejia, 2015) We also can easily “misremember” experience, for example, when we try to retrieve an event and then unknowingly add details that weren’t part of the event, and the act of retrieval subsequently comes to serve as our memory of the event instead.
This isn’t intended to excuse Williams’ record of recounting the mistaken narrative over and over at public events and as a talk show guest – even when NBC execs quietly urged him to stop doing so. He wasn’t intentionally lying. But as a journalist devoted to veracity, he should have known better. Which brings us to the second lesson of his story.
It has been a very long time since Brian Williams was simply a journalist. Williams, first and foremost, is a brand. Moreover, he is a celebrity brand. Being a celebrity in our culture means several things. For one, celebrity status creates its own little reality bubble in which the inhabitant lives and breathes. The bubble invites celebrities to perceive and promote their own reality, in a sense – and, being a celebrity, others tend not to question your version of reality. For a person calling himself a journalist, however, this is professional death. To witness the world faithfully, the journalist must occupy the world as it is lived by others. They must regularly breathe in the air of ambiguity. Their daily diet must be a menu of multiple, often conflicting, truths. And yet, in communication programs around the country, a new gospel of “entrepreneurial journalism” has taken hold – with the gutting of tens of thousands of mainstream journalism jobs since 2008, aspiring reporters and producers are being told to focus on cultivating their own “brand.” On one level, this makes perfect sense: writers and editors are entering a deeply fragmented market in which a spot in the newsroom of a major metro daily or in a network affiliate studio is no longer the norm; individual voices can now command huge online audiences. But when the logical extension of this focus on journalism branding points to superbrands such as Williams, mixing journalism with celebrity will inevitably result in a toxic brew. TV critic Mary McNamara made this point well:
Modern journalism is beset by many challenges logistical and fundamental, but none are as potentially dangerous as its growing cultivation of and reliance on personal brand. We now expect our journalists to be personalities, to exist outside the confines of their day jobs in exciting and entertaining ways. It's not enough to deliver the news; star journalists need to tweet humorously and/or with special insight. They need to make cameos in comedies, appear on talk shows and in magazines, to share their style secrets and personal lives, and offer across-the-board commentary. (2015)
The economic pressures of journalism will likely continue to result in the intermingling of news “brands” with our celebrity culture. And that bodes ill for us all. Business marketing and branding research tells us that negative information tends to be more damaging when the celebrity is judged to be responsible for his deeds (Louie et al., 2001), or when the celebrity’s behavior brings shame or damage to broader public interests (Money et al., 2006). Furthermore, when consumers make a moral judgment about celebrity behavior, it not only affects the trustworthiness perceptions of the individual, but damages the brand associated with the celebrity (Zhou & Whitla, 2013, p. 1018).
And what will become of Williams? We need not worry; when his exile ends in August, NBC will still have a valuable brand on their hands. But it will be as an entertainer, not in the news division. Williams is a natural entertainer, and the job he really wanted was to be Jay Leno’s successor as a show host king. Instead of “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” look for “Tonight with Brian Williams.”
References
Louie, T.A., Kulik, R.L., & Jacobsen, R. (2001). When bad things happen to the endorsers of good products. Marketing Letters 12(1), 13-23.
McNamara, M. (2015, February 8). Brian Williams: Personal branding got in the way of the news. Los Angeles Times. Available: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-brian-will…
Mejia, B. (2015, February 6). Scientists explain how Brian Williams’ memory may have failed him. Los Angeles Times. Available: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-memory-blame-brian-…
Money, R.B., Shimp, T.A., & Sakano, T. (2006). Celebrity endorsements in Japan and the United States: Is negative information all that harmful? Journal of Advertising Research 46(1), 113-23.
Zhou, L., & Whitla, P. (2013). How negative celebrity influences consumer attitudes: The mediating role of moral reputation. Journal of Business Research 66, 1013-1020.
