It sucks right now to be NBC’s Brian Williams.  And this news story about the news just demonstrates how stupid the news has become.

The NBC newsman was suspended Tuesday night for six months amid charges that he misremembered or conflated wartime incidents he reported on from Iraq and Israel. He has also come under scrutiny for possible conflations in reporting from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Williams told stories that, among other things, misrepresented his proximity to danger or death. Some have called his reportage “humble-bragging,” trying to enhance his reputation by focusing on supposed duress.
The main misremembrance, for which Williams apologized last week, pertains to a 2003 incident in Iraq. Williams said that the Army Chinook he was riding in was forced down by a rocket-propelled grenade — except that his helicopter wasn’t the one that was hit.

Then in 2006, while covering the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, Williams initially reported on MSNBC that he was flying at about 1,500 feet and could see two rockets launched from about six miles away.

A month later, the story changed when he told Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart that rockets passed 1,500 feet below his helicopter. Then in 2007, he told an audience at Fairfield University that the rockets sailed just beneath him.

In the New Orleans incident, Williams reported that he saw a corpse floating down the street from his hotel window. But Williams was in the Ritz-Carlton on the edge of the French Quarter, where there was little to no flooding.
These are conflicting statements, to be sure, but were they malicious or intentionally misleading? Or, are they just stories that get better in the retelling, as humans tend to do

The answer is the second.  Our recollection of traumatic events is often flawed in some part because fear alters the brain and memory. Whether one is hit or not, surely the terror of flying where rockets are near can magnify and distort events.

But more importantly — and incredibly, I think I’m the only one who actually has said this — these misremembrances only reflect upon Brian Williams the man or Brian Williams the celebrity.  In other words……WHO CARES?  Will people TRUST Brian Williams again??? Are you serious with that question???

Let me put it this way — if Brian Williams got on TV and delivered the news — NOT his personal experiences, but the news — would anybody doubt him?  If he reported:

President Obama’s has sent draft war powers to Congress this morning.  The proposed legislation would repeal the 2002 Authorization for Uses of Military Forces which gave broad powers to the President (Bush, then Obama) after Sept. 11 attacks.

…. would anyone think he was LYING?

And not for nothing, but Jon Stewart is right.  If the media had exhibited this much scrutiny on Bush & Cheney & Rumsfeld, and held them accountable for their lies — which is what the media should be doing rather than eating its own — we would have saved thousands of lives.

I hate this Brian Williams story.  On the other hand, he would make a great replacement for Jon Stewart.

UPDATE – Ed Gilgore gets it, too (or rather, doesn’t get it):

So remind me again why the Brian Williams saga is supposed to be a big deal to anyone other than him or his embarrassed employer? No, I don’t like to see anybody lose their job—or for that matter, to be suspended without pay for six months—but I’m guessing Williams won’t be missing any meals. Is his admitted lie some sort of blow to the Fourth Estate? Only if you have a very, very old-fashioned regard for the glorified news-readers we call network anchors. Fact is, it’s not even clear if or how Williams’ lie or lies affected his network’s coverage of Iraq or of Katrina, unless you are going to join the doomed and nasty cause of those suggesting the latter was no worse than a bad thunderstorm.

Some conservatives are giving the old heave-ho to the claim that Williams is a“liberal” trophy whose downfall should be greeted by lusty cheers from Real Americans everywhere. But there was nothing especially ideological about the self-aggrandizing fibs Williams told to make himself part of the “stories” he was telling, and as WaPo’s Aaron Blake noted yesterday, he has not been especially demonized by conservatives up until now.

My own indifference is probably attributable to the fact that I almost never watch network news, and have certainly never been “influenced” by Brian Williams so far as I can tell.