In news or war, there's no place for embellishment

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We all know that wars and battlefield conflicts are dangerous experiences. There are at least 30,000 young men and women who were wounded in battle in Iraq or Afghanistan and will bear the scars of those tragedies for many years to come.

There are two other groups whose lives are affected as a result of such events. They are newscasters and politicians.

Over the past week, the media have been churning out story after story about “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams. If I were a Hollywood casting director, Williams would be my first choice to deliver the news. He is handsome, articulate and friendly and has a great sense of humor. There’s no doubt that Williams has long been considered one of the best salesmen of the nightly news.

But, like many others before him, Williams became larger than life, and when you become a prime-time celebrity, you have the opportunity to play fast and loose with the truth. Williams never had to make up any battlefield stories about himself because he had built up enormous credibility with the public. All he had to do was just be Brian Williams. If he stayed at the top long enough, he could have become the Walter Cronkite of the news business.

If Williams pays attention to history, he didn’t have to go back too far to see another unraveling of a network anchor, the 2005 calamity of Dan Rather. There is no doubt that Rather was at the top of his game, and considered by many to be the next Cronkite. No matter what news programs you watched at that time, Rather was there. Hurricanes, White House intrigue, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster — even going back to the fall of Richard Nixon — Rather was the voice of believable newscasters.

Regrettably, Rather anchored a report on “60 Minutes” that delved into President George W. Bush’s military record, based on documents that Rather believed to be true and correct. But after weeks of heavy criticism, Rather acknowledged that the validity of the documents could not be proved. His brilliant career took a big hit.

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