Don’t Talk About Yourself. Brian Williams’ favorite subject, judging from his whoppers, is Brian Williams. In addition to the RPG, Williams has routinely recounted first-hand, dramatic impressions of things he probably didn’t see or experience while covering Hurricane Katrina for NBC News: watching his pricey New Orleans hotel being “overrun” by gangs; contracting dysentery; camping out on a mattress in a hotel stairwell; and seeing a body floating through the French Quarter, as a Washington Post piece reports. A first-person treatment adds verisimilitude to a work of journalism, but like TV it can resemble swimming into a riptide. There’s an old press cliché that the best journalistic stories are told in the bar, but there are reasons for that: (1) No editors are there to vet questionable material; and (2) alcohol. If only Williams had avoided talking about himself, he might still be anchor. If you’re a TV guy and you want to talk about yourself, write a book and have it fact-checked…

Know Your Limits. Journalists hate being told that they’re not experts on everything from fracking to Gaza to Obamacare to polling technology to the economy to police to water policy to the Supreme Court. Journalists tend to think of themselves as “quick studies” who can get up to speed overnight about any breaking news topic. They can’t. Not even network news anchors know enough or have the talent to know enough to sound off about everything. “I don’t know” or “I would have to check my notes” may be a dull answer for a news anchor to give to a question, but it’s always better to be dull than to be wrong. When Vanity Fair climbed inside Williams’ skull in May, it speculated that feelings of inadequacy might be at the roots of his fantastic stories: “Though he had worked as NBC’s chief White House correspondent for two years, he was never a foreign or war correspondent. He was deeply insecure about this, some of his friends believe.”