Getting Caught Up In Telling Stories

   


NBC News anchor Brian Williams with his daughter, actress Allison Williams, and his wife Jane Williams at HBO's "Girls" fourth season premiere party in New York.
NBC News anchor Brian Williams with his daughter, actress Allison Williams, and his wife Jane Williams at HBO's "Girls" fourth season premiere party in New York.
Evan Agostini/AP 
                   
A lot of folks are trying to make sense of what would drive Brian Williams, a reporter, the face of NBC news, to make up easily fact-checkable stories about his experiences as a reporter embedded with troops during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. His apology has only made things worse.

He says he made a "mistake." But it just isn't plausible that a mistake of memory could have led him to believe that he'd been in a helicopter shot down over enemy territory. No, he lied about it. The question is, why? Ego? Self-aggrandizement? Trying to make himself seem better, braver, tougher, more experienced than he really is?

I have a slightly different hypothesis: Brian Williams is a storyteller and storytellers can't resist a good story.


Read more at  http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2015/02/06/383975796/getting-caught-up-in-telling-stories

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