The Horrible, Awful, No Good Week

For those who still believe in the power and magnificence of journalism, last week was a truly awful week.

It started, of course, with the downward spiral of Brian Williams’ career after it was confirmed that he had been telling an untruth about a news reporting incident in Iraq. The same day that Mr. Williams announced he was taking himself off the air, Jon Stewart announced he was stepping down as host of The Daily Show.

The week was far from over, though, and the losses still to come took the form of tragedy. Veteran reporter Bob Simon was killed in a car accident on Wednesday night. (This, after surviving 40 days of captivity 24 years ago in Iraq.) And then I awoke on Friday to the news that The New York Times’ esteemed media critic, David Carr – who only days earlier had written about Brian Williams – had died in the newsroom, after suffering an apparent heart attack. Later on Friday, former NBC foreign correspondent Ned Colt died of a stroke in Boston.

Even the heartbreaking news out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where a Muslim couple and sister were gunned down, had an odd and unexpected connection to journalism: The young wife had been featured on NPR’s acclaimed Story Corps last year, interviewing her elementary school teacher.

It was a week of spectacular and breathtaking loss. It was a week in which those of us who love the media, who earn our livings by following them and studying their work, struggled to make sense of a series of events that were sad, cruel, bizarre, random and senseless.

In the early days of the Brian Williams scandal, I penned a blog post in which I predicted that Mr. Williams would ultimately survive, because NBC had too much to lose if he didn’t.

I had to table it when Mr. Williams’ future suddenly became far from clear.

It is now more than a week later, and all I feel is immense sadness. My (self-)righteous indignation over Mr. Williams’ transgressions has softened into an overwhelming sense of loss. Grace – not a notion often associated with journalism – was on full display in columns by New York Times columnist David Brooks, the writer Annie Lamott and – perhaps most poignantly – David Carr, all of whom urged that Mr. Williams be forgiven.

If last week taught us nothing else, it reinforced for us that journalists are human. Human enough to make mistakes. Human enough to be mortal.

When I played the Story Corps recording of slain Muslim Yusor Abu-Salha interviewing her childhood teacher, I was moved to sudden tears when she asked her teacher what advice she would share with the world. “Live in peace,” she replied. “I wish we all would learn to live in peace and harmony.”

To all those we lost last week – literally and symbolically – live (on) in peace.