Brian Williams Scandal Shows Power of Social Media

The soldiers who prompted Brian Williams’s fall from one of the most powerful jobs in the media had first tried to blow the whistle on him in 2003. But that was before the Internet became ubiquitous. And so, like most people who had a problem with the news, the soldiers had few options. A clip of Williams recounting a helicopter attack in Iraq had been broadcast by NBC, then dissipated into the ether. So Joe Summerlin and some of the other soldiers involved in the incident, frustrated by what they viewed as a disingenuous presentation by Williams, did the only things they could easily do: They left futile notes of complaint in the news vans of rival networks, and, in a gesture of silent protest, made sure they switched channels when Williams appeared on their screens again.

Twelve years later, many more options were available, and Summerlin and his fellow soldiers were able to start a new breed of television scandal -- one that began with their Facebook comments, was amplified by Twitter and reached a crescendo as amateur sleuths took to YouTube to fact-check Williams’s reporting. Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University, who has studied the history of broadcast news, said that Williams fell into “an overall move towards a greater truth standard. It is just harder to get away with dissembling now.” Social media, he said, “is a great device for catching this stuff.”