Longtime New Yorker magazine staff writer Lillian Ross once admonished aspiring reporters not to write about themselves. “As a reporter, serve your subject,” she wrote, “do not serve yourself. Do not, in effect, say, ‘Look at me. See what a great reporter I am!’”
Sounds quaint in the age of the selfie, doesn’t it?
NBC News anchor Brian Williams got everyone to look at him when he told his dramatic tale of being in a helicopter that got hit by rocket fire in Iraq in 2003. Now he’s probably wishing he had stuck to serving his subject.
The irony, of course, is that by falsely inserting himself into the helicopter story, Williams is now at the center of a far bigger journalism ethics story, where he surely would rather not be.
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