Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

So Brian Williams has taken six months off from his role as managing editor and anchor for NBC. 

It was inevitable and I rather doubt he will be coming back. It is very difficult to take seriously his claim that he accidentally "conflated" the memory of being in a helicopter that was hit by an RPG and had to make an emergency landing with the fact that he was not in the helicopter, though he may have been in another one nearby.

Even his claim to have been in the following helicopter is difficult to reconcile with the memory of Lance Reynolds that Williams turned up an hour later. 

Of course, if Williams was in a copter that had to make an emergency landing because another copter in the convoy had been hit, that would have been frightening and probably very memorable. But even under these circumstances – and even Williams has not offered this excuse – the flood of relief on realising later that his copter had not been hit would also have been memorable.

Just like the now-crticised stories from Hurricane Katrina, Williams's story puts him closer to the action – and by implication make him seem more heroic – than the facts. This not only makes him less trustworthy, it makes him less likable, and they will both be problems if NBC ever wants to bring him back. That's very unlikely to happen.

Media stories about false memory syndrome seem like journalists rallying round to one of their own. The examples given mostly involve either people being manipulated into creating false memories from their childhood or people misremembering minor details. George W Bush, for example, recalled watching the plane hit the first tower on live TV. That wasn't broadcast live, though the second plane hitting was. That's a pretty small detail. It is not as if Bush remembered being in New York and watching it live, or rescuing someone from the rubble. That would be much closer to the self-aggrandising "memories" of Brian Williams.