Before I get into what I really want to say in this column, I have to talk about my recent annual winter getaway trip.
Of course, I went to Las Vegas again, mainly because I didn’t feel like getting shot at by drug smugglers in Mexico.
I wanted a nice boring trip, but what I got was my most exciting Vegas vacation yet. My plane ride down there was particularly hair raising.
It started off routinely enough with our WestJet plane lifting off the ground from Saskatoon. But then I noticed a few strange things. It started when our satellite TV feed in the aircraft suddenly cut out when we flew over the Montana-Wyoming border.
Then, as we flew over Utah, I noticed some strange lights outside the window. It was aircraft flying by. That raised my suspicions some more.
As we flew closer to Las Vegas, you could see an increase in the number of aircraft flying past outside. Were we being followed? Where were these planes from? North Korea?
Then it happened. Just as we approached Las Vegas, we heard a loud bang, the plane shook and it immediately took a dive.
Our jet had been hit by gunfire!
I was scared out of my wits. We were all freaking out in the cabin. But somehow, some way, our heroic pilots kept our WestJet plane in the air long enough to make a hair-raising emergency landing at the McCarran International Airport.
When the plane came to a stop on the runway, we burst into applause. We were so happy to have landed, alive.
All the passengers were ushered into the terminal and debriefed by U.S. government officials, and after that we were on our way in the sandy desert, as if nothing happened.
Of course, I am joking. I am totally exaggerating and embellishing about my boring WestJet flight to Vegas.
I simply couldn’t help myself, especially after this scandal erupted recently in which NBC News anchor Brian Williams had to apologize for his story about how the helicopter he was riding in during the Iraq War was hit by enemy gunfire.
He had repeated this tale on various occasions including on David Letterman’s late night TV show. It turns out his story was completely phony.
This was not a case of a reporter reporting something and simply getting it wrong. This was not about making honest mistakes, which we reporters do too often for our liking.
No, this is about outright spewing a line of bull, repeatedly.
Memories are not perfect. Events can and do get confused, especially after several years pass. We are human, after all. But at the very least, if your memory is fuzzy about the details, say it! Don’t tell some dramatic tale and make it sound like the absolute gospel if it isn’t.
If you are going to tell people you were shot at and repeat it on the David Letterman show and elsewhere, you’d better have your facts straight.
Williams now has about as much credibility as Claudette the Frog. Anyone who has ever read Claudette’s stories in our paper surely knows by now that her “news reports” are frequently chock full of half-truths and exaggerations unworthy of a real reporter.
As an aside, I never thought the day would come when Brian Williams and Claudette the Frog could be lumped together in the same sentence.
Williams is now suspended by NBC News for six months without pay.
That’s good. For the next six months, that should reduce confusion for people who mix him up with the other Brian Williams who is over on TSN.
I guess the real point I was going to make is that it is vitally important for someone in Williams’ position as a news anchor to not only deliver the news with credibility, but to carry himself with credibility as well.
The reason is because we live in a day and age where nobody wants to believe the real news anymore.
Look at all these “conspiracy theories” floating around on the Internet. We have people going around claiming 9/11 was a big plot by the U.S. government, or that the moon landings were faked and on and on. What’s worse, people actually believe this junk!
What I am saying is there has to be some places, some repository, of credibility out there where people can get accurate and trustworthy information.
News organizations ought to be among them, but their credibility is coming increasingly under attack with accusations of biased agendas and the like.
When you have the face of a news division, the anchor, telling tall tales, it undermines everyone in the business of seeking out the truth, which is what the news ought to be.
In response, ordinary people will tune the news out completely and believe what they want to believe, regardless of whether it’s true or not.
As a result, we all end up further removed from the truth — whatever it is.
What is really sad about this episode is that it takes away from what journalists do out in the field on a regular basis.
Some of the assignments truly are dangerous, and correspondents really do get shot at, captured or blown up.
It is on this note that I talk about Bob Simon, the famed 60 Minutes correspondent who died in a car accident last week.
This is a guy who covered one hair-raising news story after another in the world’s hotspots, from Vietnam to Iraq. The most dramatic story was the time Simon and his CBS crew went missing during the Gulf War in 1991. In fact, all four of them were taken prisoner and held in Iraq for 40 frightening days before they were finally released.
For it to end like this for Simon — in an accident on the streets of relatively civilized New York — is a story you just don’t want to believe. You wish this story was not true.
