We can get into trouble telling stories.

Few things evoke more high-handed, Puritanical moralizing than someone else doing something untoward that each of us has done ourselves – like telling a story that isn’t strictly or literally true. We condemn others’ embellishments, in part, because we’re the ones who didn’t get caught.

“Lying” is inherent to storytelling: every time you tell a story of any kind, you are engaging in some act of fiction. Even when you act with the best of intentions, the process of editing and the nature of language mean that what you tell is not the same as what happened, no matter how heavy your bent toward severe literalism. That’s how stories work.

But stories are not journalism, though (again, with the question of the nature of language) we call them that. There are, however, few forms of storytelling that have the specific aspirations that journalism does: it is the attempt to do the impossible and tell the literal truth – which is what makes it noble. Once we admit that every story is fiction, it makes the attempt to tell the truth so much more important; and when we as listeners take the risk to believe, it’s incredibly damaging when that trust is violated.

Bill O’Reilly’ and Brian Williams’ cases could not be more similar: both are prominent broadcast journalists in television at the top of their game; and both told war stories that contain inaccuracies so blatant that common sense says they lied. But one of these men has been heavily punished and the other will not only survive, but be rewarded because one asked for our trust, and then other never bothered to earn it nor care if he did.

Williams lied about where he was in relationship to a rocket attack on a helicopter – but he was in the war zone and there was an attack. He dramatized his experience to tell a good story, though his job was to be a journalist. For that, he faces a suspension that cripples and possibly ends his career, and may be the only prominent American who has ever been punished for lying about the Iraq War.



O’Reilly on Fox News told a much bigger story (and if reports are to be believed, more than one) – that he was in a war zone he simply was over a thousand miles away from, detailing scenes of carnage and disorder that simply never occurred. O’Reilly, though, has not been and will not be punished.

Of course, there’s no reputation to protect when O’Reilly lies – if lying, obfuscating, double-talking, and stonewalling the truth were issues at Fox News, tomorrow’s broadcast would be anchored by a lone confused janitor in their empty offices. NBC, on the other hand, raked Williams over the coals because they are a journalistic enterprise and their reputation demands it.

Williams and O’Reilly told their stories in part to glorify themselves, but they also told them because they wanted to evoke vivid scenes and paint images that stay in their viewers’ minds. But that’s why we use different forms for our storytelling: context matters. A story told over a campfire is different than a story told on the nightly news. We even created forms of art and expression – like theater – which are designed to embrace the nature of fiction and dramatization.

Few people know better than me who gets hurt when one kind of storytelling is asked to stand in for the other. I make a kind of theater that blurs the lines between narrative and literalism, and when journalists asked me if a monologue I had created could be adapted and aired as journalism, I let them air it without caveat. Doing so brought down a firestorm of criticism that I richly deserved, and hurt the people and larger truths to which I was trying to bring much-needed attention.

By abusing the narrative authority of journalism I hurt something much larger than myself. I was held to account and it was painful, but it ultimately made me a better artist – and made it clear to everyone, including me, that I’m not a journalist.

If journalists want journalism to mean something, they are the ones who will have to do more – and they can’t rely on other people’s corporate management to do it for them. They can’t just police their own after their own get caught and hope that the public keeps trusting by default. They should clean their houses and declare what the profession really means to them by drawing a bright line between what journalism is and what Fox is happy to broadcast and call “news”.

Fox News pretending that it’s an actual journalistic undertaking hurts no one more than real journalists who are actually trying to do their jobs, just as allowing my theater to be presented as a journalistic undertaking hurt real journalists trying to do their jobs. Stop letting them pretend – or stop wondering why people don’t trust journalists.