Brian Williams has been suspended from his slot with NBC Nightly News. Apparently he lied. Yes, he did “fess-up” and he apologized. But I have to wonder: Is the case of Brian Williams symptomatic of this nation’s moral decline?
Some will forgive him and give him a second chance. Others will not. Either way, he has certainly lost something in the process. People trusted him. So we have to ask: Given his obvious talent, his professional stature and skill, why did he feel the need to lie in the first place? What had he hoped to gain that he did not already possess?
He is not the first, nor will he be the last media-celebrity to go down for exercising poor judgment and/or transgressing against personal and professional standards of conduct. For some public figures, their road to perdition is so obvious that the public sees it coming long before they do, blinded by arrogant and perpetual denial as they are. But then there are surprises, like Brian Williams. Or IS he a surprise?
Was he under pressure? If so, was this pressure internal, self-made personal pressure? Or was he being pressured from outside, from the corporate top, from the business? Or was it a combination of both internal and external pressure—to be number one, to stay at the top, to beat-out all other competitors by any means and at any cost!
We Americans like to believe and would like to assume that our most beloved and most celebrated public figures are people of noble character. Indeed, ideally speaking, honesty, integrity, sincerity, transparency, and gracious humility, to name a few, should be core character-traits of any public figure of notoriety.
However, my guess is that when fame and fortune and competition for first place and the jostling for top position are at stake, not to mention the need to please the corporate powers that be in their demand for success and nothing less, a “win by any means” attitude begins to kick in. In short, when business comes first, as in ratings and money, I have no doubt that many high moral and ethical standards are compromised along the way. It is human nature.
What makes things worse is that we now live in a day when we no longer agree upon a moral compass as a nation, making it easier to justify moral compromises along the way. We don’t want the Ten Commandments displayed in our public places. We don’t want a religious voice in the public square of debate and dialogue. We don’t want public prayer. We don’t want the Biblical language of “sin” or “fallen nature” or “unrighteousness.” We don’t want talk of Biblical authority or Revelation, as in God revealing God’s Self to humanity.
So we have replaced God with ourselves as our own moral authority. We humans have become our own standard. We now define what is good, right, and ethical for ourselves. And so, when it comes to conveying “truth,” for example, subtle but unverified suggestion, intimation, and half-truths will suffice, if it enhances a story or promotes a cause or justifies a perspective. Putting “spin” on a story is not only allowable but expected. We are at the point where we must ask, as Pontius Pilot once asked Jesus, What is truth?
What is it, really? Is truth what we want it to be, what we hope it to be, what we will it to be? Is truth a matter of convenience, a tool, a weapon, a malleable pliable means-to-an-end, a changeling to be used willy-nilly as one chooses? This is certainly how truth seems to be used from left to right, in all rightwing/leftwing debates. Isn’t it? Take one issue, just one, say global warming: “Global warming is unreal; it’s all a fabrication,” says one side. Really?! Is that the actual solid TRUTH of the matter? If that is true, then someone has got to be feeding us great lies. Who? Why? How? And to what end?
We humans have a way of going into denial when we don’t want to hear hard truth about ourselves. We often refuse to accept truth we dislike or that is “inconvenient”—truth that holds us accountable, for example. We don’t want to accept the truth when it is to our disadvantage or when it will cost us to own it. We don’t want to know the truth when it forces us to admit we’re in the wrong. We’d just rather remain happily ignorant of the truth.
As a people, a nation, I think we’re in trouble because we no longer have a collective moral compass. And I believe evidence of this is found in the financial crisis of 2007-2008 which spun us into the great recession of these past few years. Exactly why did our large financial institutions become too big to fail? And exactly why did these big financial institutions need bailing out by the taxpayers, even as big individual money people who caused the fallout walked away unscathed? This is why: human ego, hubris, greed, selfishness, pride, abuse of power—character traits that we all collectively used to know from the Bible as coming from our fallen human sinful nature—something that used to be taught to us as that which must be resisted and redeemed. But we don’t speak in those terms anymore. And we no longer encourage its resistance and no longer believe it needs redeeming.
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