How far the fourth estate has fallen.
Earlier this month, a Wrightsville elected official asked me if something I had written was “actually true?”
The fourth estate is a term that originally declared the press (newspapers at the time) as a fourth branch of government. The term is attributed to a British politician as he referred to the three branches of government in the British parliament as estates. However, in referring to the reporter’s gallery, he said, “But in the Reporter’s Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.”
In modern times, Merriam Webster defines the term the fourth estate as the people and organizations who report the news: journalists as a group.
The mounting evidence that veteran television anchor Brian Williams did falsify at least one first-hand Iraqi war account to millions of television and Internet viewers should not be taken lightly.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees us freedom of speech as well as freedom of the press, but carries with it a heady responsibility for the press to be the people’s watchdog — accurate press prevents misbehavior by political leaders.
With this comes a responsibility to ferret out and report all of the news truthfully.
Restricting or hampering the press’s ability to gather and publish the news has become all too common.
Police, municipalities, elected officials, utility companies, and other entities have public information officers (PIOs) whose job is to manage the information given out to the press. Information is spun, censored, repressed. It can be withheld, or its release delayed to coincide with a more favorable news cycle.
In that ever increasing vacuum and in a society with ever loosening moral standards, the ethics of many a journalist have been tried.
Media world-wide were shaken when it was discovered that 27-year-old Jayson Blair, a New York Times journalist, had plagiarized and fabricated details and interviews in his reporting. His deceptions were prolific and outrageous and it shook the journalism world to the core. He had risen the ladder at the venerated Times, after all. The NYTimes owned up, publishing a lengthy front-page piece about the scandal in May 2003. Blair reported first hand from cities and events he had not traveled to; he reported details that had not occurred; he referenced materials that did not exist.
Before him, in 1998 the fall of Stephen Glass of The New Republic, who had risen to an associate editor position, captured headlines.
Blair was not just a flunky given stories he was not qualified to report on; he had graduated from the University of Maryland’s journalism school, achieved the editor-in-chief slot on the student newspaper then moved on to The Boston Globe internships. He completed a lengthy internship at the Times before being hired full-time.
So, editors and news teams all along his career had a chance to see warning signs. Make no mistake, there are always warning signs.
In Glass’ case, in 1996 and 1997, at least two targets of hostile articles by Glass accused The New Republic and Glass of falsehoods, inaccuracies, distortions and possible plagiarism. The New Republic, nonetheless, defended Glass’ reporting.
Both Blair and Glass told stories in the present tense as if they had actually been on the scene and interviewed live people. That would later be found to be untrue.
Blair was quoted on 8/15/14 by The Huffington Post, from his 8/17/14 Oprah interview as saying, “What I found is that when you cross the line once it becomes easier, and easier to cross it again.”
Not necessarily known for its accuracy, Wikipedia reports on an “NPR radio show Talk of the Nation, Blair explained his fabrications started with what he thought was a relatively innocent infraction: using a quote from a press conference which he had missed. He described a gradual process whereby his ethical violations became worse and contended that his main motivation was a fear of not living up to the expectations that he and others had for his career.”
Perhaps it will be revealed that Brian Williams also found himself in this unenviable ethical position. He has already publically conceded that a helicopter in which he was riding did not come under enemy fire in the Iraq war as he has repeatedly reported.
Williams’ story about having been on board a helicopter hit by enemy fire and forced to land has been categorized as self-aggrandizement and the fog of memory. Williams’ televised accounts have changed over the almost-decade since he first reported the story, even talking to Letterman. The latest was in January and that was when things started to unravel for him. This week, even his shallow apology has been decried untruthful. Stars and Stripes reports soldiers who were aboard the helicopter that did come under fire say the helicopter Williams was on was not a part of the helicopter company that came under RPG fire, but in another company, going in another direction.
Also drawing fresh scrutiny, possibly creating critical mass, is Williams’ career-making reporting from 2005 post Hurricane Katrina in devastated New Orleans. He reported personally seeing a dead body float beneath his Ritz-Carleton room window, being sick from dysentery and terrorizing of guests by armed gangs at the hotel. None of it may be true.
The floating dead body story has come back to haunt Williams; the area around the Ritz-Carlton only saw inches of flooding.
As pressure mounts, his reporting of a 1970 New Jersey robbery is being questioned and he has stepped down from the lofty high as the nation’s billion dollar ad revenue news anchor.
Make no mistake here; while manufacturing a news report is not a crime, lying is a gross violation of journalistic ethics.
We report the news Brian Williams, we don’t make the news.
When a reporter, no matter how high on the food chain, breaks the code of ethics, or the public’s trust, he or she walks in ignominy, forever on shaky ground — grounds for dismissal.
We stand not in judgment of Williams, Blair, Glass and plenty of other liars like them, but our empathy only extends so far. For when guilty of fabrication, they erode the public trust in the venerated fourth estate that once held more power than all of Britain’s Parliament.
