NBC deals with a problem of its own making

Once a television news anchor's credibility is lost, nothing else matters. Viewers have little way to assess an anchor's writing ability or reporting skills, but they can ascertain on a gut level whether they trust that anchor. Now that NBC's Brian Williams has been exposed as a teller of tall tales, he will forever be viewed by audiences as the guy who had to embellish stories. And viewers must now wonder what else Williams has distorted in his news narratives over the years.

While everybody at times has exaggerated an accomplishment, Williams' mistakes with regard to his Iraq war reporting are quite damaging. This is not the guy in the bar bragging about sinking a 50-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole when it was really just 40 feet. It's the job of a network reporter to get details right. Network news anchors getting paid $10 million a year can't afford to have foggy memories of front-line reporting.

Williams rightly deserves credit for reporting from the Iraq war zone in the first place, not to mention other dangerous on-location places during his career. Those are hard-duty assignments that deserve our respect. That should be sufficient to generate our appreciation for Williams. But being the number one-ranked network news anchor was apparently not enough for Williams, who felt compelled to embellish his Iraq experience to generate more adulation from his audience.

Williams' situation exposes a lot of what is wrong in the broadcast news industry. NBC made Williams a super-sized personality, feeding his ego by parading him on "Saturday Night Live," "Comedy Central," sitcoms and various gab fests. He even slow jammed the news on occasion for comedian Jimmy Fallon's show. These antics were designed to promote Williams as a pop culture celeb, not as a journalist. To NBC, Williams was a marketing commodity more than a journalistic commodity.

NBC execs apparently knew of Williams's exaggerated war stories for some time, but failed to effectively reel him in. NBC also made Williams the managing editor of his own evening news broadcast, centralizing way too much editorial control into one place. With Williams as the lead anchor and managing editor, nobody else in the room was in a position to question the news priorities of the broadcast. There is a saying about absolute power. While Williams deserves the suspension he's been given, other people in the NBC hierarchy should also be on the griddle for creating the circumstances in which Williams felt so invulnerable.

It is also worth noting that Williams' tall tales were brought to public attention by the non-mainstream, military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Traditional outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post have been asleep at the switch regarding Williams' exaggerations, continuing the practice of big-time media treating itself like sacred cows.

Moving forward, NBC will monitor ratings closely and worry about which personality they can eventually groom to take Williams' anchor chair down the road. They surely know Williams is damaged goods, or they wouldn't have yanked him off the air, even for six months. If fill-in anchor Lester Holt stabilizes and maintains ratings, he will get the permanent seat, and Williams will be old news. If ratings crater with Holt, Williams could try a triumphant return, but odds are the audience will have moved on by then, leaving NBC to scramble. NBC executives will be making all of these decisions based on pragmatic considerations, such as ratings and marketing strategies, not out of any sense of right and wrong.

What NBC should do, however, is a deep introspection about the journalistic standards of the organization. While Brian Williams has been the focus of this sad story, the bigger issue is NBC's loss of principles. Fixing a network's news credibility problem should begin with a focus on journalistic values, not marketing strategies.

Jeffrey M. McCall is a professor of communication at DePauw University in Greencastle. Follow him on Twitter: @Prof_McCal.