I don’t like, trust or watch TV news so my main interest in the Brian Williams debacle, in which he has repeatedly claimed for more than a decade to have been in a U.S. military plane in Iraq that was fired upon, is psychological. For some reason, he pretended in an elaborate way that he was close to the same type of peril that genuinely caused terrible brain damage to former fellow anchor Bob Woodruff. People who should know better–who do know better in almost every other instance in their lives–can internalize a fiction and repeat it as fact until they’re eventually called out on the lie.

Even then it’s difficult for them to come clean, as has been the case with Williams, who seems to have also lied in his second version of the story. Intellectually, Williams knows such behavior can imperil his career and is unnecessary. What I’m saying is that some deeper frailty, emotionally or neurologically or both, drove his behavior and does so in others. You usually see it in people who’ve had great success early in their lives, who haven’t yet had the bullshit knocked out of them by life, but it is something beyond that with the NBC news anchor. From Rem Rieder at USA Today:

It’s an unmitigated disaster for Brian Williams and NBC News.

The revelation that the NBC anchor had lied on air about being in a helicopter that was forced down after it was hit by enemy fire during the Iraq War is devastating.

It’s hard to see how Williams gets past this, and how he survives as the face of NBC News.

An anchor’s No. 1 requirement is that he or she has credibility. If we don’t believe what an anchor tells us, what’s the point?

It’s disturbing that Williams has told many different versions of this story over the years. In some he was in a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire. In some he was in one near the chopper that was hit.

This from a man whose word should be gospel to us?

And Williams hardly has helped himself with his tortured explanations about what has gone so terribly wrong.•