06/19/15
From the New York Times
“The qualifying, and the parsing of words, was problematic, and betrayed a lack of sincerity, said Mike Paul, president of Reputation Doctor, a crisis and reputation public relations firm in New York. ‘There are no ifs or buts in a true apology,’ Mr. Paul said. ‘This was a non-apology apology…A lie is absolutely seeking to mislead someone, and an exaggeration is a lie,’ Mr. Paul said. ‘There is either a lie or the truth. We teach our children that.”
Full story:
Brian Williams tried to repair his sullied reputation with the public on Friday during his first interview since being removed as anchor of “Nightly News” on NBC, but crisis communications experts, critics and social media users said his efforts fell short of making a convincing argument.
Speaking with his NBC colleague Matt Lauer in a taped segment for the “Today” show, Mr. Williams blamed his ego for telling stories that were not true, and said his fabrications “came from clearly a bad place, a bad urge inside of me.” But he also spoke about getting things mixed up, and when pressed by Mr. Lauer about whether he had lied and should have admitted that he did, he said: “I know why people would see it that way. It is not what happened. What happened is a whole host of other sins.”
The qualifying, and the parsing of words, was problematic, and betrayed a lack of sincerity, said Mike Paul, president of Reputation Doctor, a crisis and reputation public relations firm in New York.
“There are no ifs or buts in a true apology,” Mr. Paul said. “This was a non-apology apology.”
Andrew D. Gilman, chief executive of CommCore Consulting, a crisis communications group, said that while Mr. Williams took a first step, he still is far from rebuilding trust. “At the end of the day, people want to have the traditional anchor as somebody they can trust,” he said. “I don’t think that came through. It is not his chair. It is the anchor chair.”
NBC announced on Thursday that Mr. Williams would not return to his previous position after suspending him in February. He will return to work in August as an anchor of breaking news and special reports for the MSNBC cable news network.
Once considered one of the country’s most respected broadcast journalists, Mr. Williams was found by NBC to have made a number of “inaccurate statements” about his experience during a helicopter attack in Iraq and other issues. The interview broadcast on Friday was part of an apology tour that started this week in efforts to rebuild trust and respect in Mr. Williams among viewers and NBC staff members.
Mr. Williams was under additional scrutiny, communication experts said, because much of the controversy erupted after he gave a muddled, insufficient apology in February after his fabrication about the helicopter attack stirred a skeptical response.
While he owned up to fabricating stories, Mr. Williams did not apologize directly for telling falsehoods about his reporting experiences or betraying trust, which some communications experts called a mistake.
“I know why people feel the way they do,” Mr. Williams said. “I get this. I am responsible for this. I am sorry for what happened here. I am different as a result, and I expect to be held to a different standard.”
Experts said Mr. Williams should have avoided making excuses, called his actions unacceptable and simply apologized outright. Some said he should have also apologized to the military veterans who originally raised complaints about his statements. The public is willing to give celebrities second chances after they make mistakes, experts said, but they need to be humble, direct and authentic, and commit to rebuilding trust.
How Brian Williams’s Iraq Story Changed
A compilation of Brian Williams’s television appearances shows how his accounts of a 2003 episode on military helicopters in Iraq gradually became more perilous.Published OnFeb. 6, 2015
Others wondered whether legal issues prevented Mr. Williams from making a clear and direct apology.
Another major issue came when Mr. Lauer, who said that neither he nor Mr. Williams had agreed to any conditions or guidelines for the interview, repeatedly pressed Mr. Williams on whether he lied. Mr. Williams wouldn’t go that far, and said he had not intended to mislead people.
“It is so clear to me that I said things that were wrong,” he said. “I told stories that were wrong. It wasn’t from a place where I was trying to use my job or title to mislead.”
Communications consultants said that Mr. Williams’s response conveyed a sense that he still hadn’t fully come to terms with his actions or their consequences.
“A lie is absolutely seeking to mislead someone, and an exaggeration is a lie,” Mr. Paul said. “There is either a lie or the truth. We teach our children that.”
NBC conducted an internal investigation into Mr. Williams’s reporting that was not made public. The network said in a news release on Thursday that Mr. Williams had “made a number of inaccurate statements” about his experiences in the field.
Mr. Williams did not directly address a question from Mr. Lauer about whether he wanted to correct the record of other instances of his reporting. Rather, he said that “what has happened in the past has been identified and torn apart by me and has been fixed and has been dealt with.”