Honestly...?

News junkies, media watchers,

couch potatoes, lend me your ears.

I come to bury Brian Williams, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

So let it be with Brian. The noble NBC

Hath told you Brian was ambitious.

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Brian answered it.

-The Angle's mashup of the Brian Williams saga

with Act 3 of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

No, Brian Williams isn't dead. He isn't even dead to me. In fact, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the NBC newsman's many creative fictitious and exaggerated memories, one of which was being shot at while riding in a military helicopter in Iraq. After all, Hillary Clinton has told a similar tale of her plane landing under sniper fire in Bosnia, a story also untrue. Both have corrected and apologized for their mis-rememberings. Brian Williams is on a six-month suspension from his news anchor job at NBC with the possibility of his never coming back. Hillary Clinton is most likely gearing up to run for president in 2016.

Huh?

In light of the Brian Williams incident, I've been thinking about truth, story-telling, memory and lies and how they all interplay in what we ultimately remember about any given incident. Gregory House, fictional television medical diagnostician, says that everybody lies. I prefer to think everybody doesn't always remember things clearly or in the same way. Some of us, like Williams and Clinton, are caught up in a sense of story and the emotion of the moment, embellish, and then eventually, in the retelling, sometimes step over the line that lies between exaggeration and a downright untruth. And if you are a “respected” news person like Williams, that step over the line will, and should have, consequences. And, if like Williams, you find yourself stepping over the line frequently, well, it's time to closely examine where that line is and why your feet feel the need to stray past its bounds.

It probably does not come as a surprise that I would have a somewhat forgiving attitude toward the embellished memories of others. I fish, and as a fisher(wo)man, I understand the dynamic of remembering the fish I caught as being longer and heavier than a tape measure or scale would have accurately indicated. So, it also won't come as a surprise that my favorite essay on how we remember things would come from someone who fishes. John Gierach, one of my favorite writers who just happens to be an avid fly fisherman, wrote a kind and insightful essay* on how people in general, and fisherman specifically, don't always remember the same things about an event. He quotes novelist John Irving as saying that a memoir is what the author remembers, not necessarily what happened. Gierach then goes on to describe the differing memories of fellow fisherman on the same fishing trip and concludes:

...I think my standard recollection of fishing is made up of the emotion of the moment, the mood of the day, the scenery, the company, the weather, who I am, who I think I am, who I'd like to be, my own sense of poetry and a few tattered shreds of what actually happened...

And so it is with all of us, whether we fish or not. To maintain our integrity and credibility, we have a responsibility to find as many of those tattered shreds of what actually happened and recreate a story that is as close to the truth as possible. To do this, we may have to take the emotion of the moment and our sense of poetry and ruthlessly restrain their tendency to drag us toward exaggeration and ultimately over that line to untruth. Whether we are in a helicopter in Iraq, on the tarmac in Bosnia, or in a canoe on the backyard pond, we are called to be as truthful as we can, acknowledging we may, knowingly or unknowingly, miss the mark at times, and suffer the consequences.

Is Brian Williams's suspension too harsh? Perhaps... Is it wrong Hillary Clinton has gotten off scot-free? Maybe... But I'm in no position to judge. Right now I'm trying to remember if that largemouth bass I caught last summer really was over twenty inches...

Even eminent chartered accountants are known, in their capacity as fishermen, blissfully to ignore differences between seven and ten inches, half a pound and two pounds, three fish and a dozen fish. - William Sherwood Fox, Silken Lines and Silver Hooks, 1954

*John Gierach, At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman, Chapter 5. Go to the library, find the book and read this chapter. It's worth it...