This past spring, a high school in my hometown of Nashville mounted a petition to get NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams to serve as its commencement speaker. The students put together a video attempting to entice him to come to the Music City. In the video, the students espouse the virtues that Williams has upheld in the past: hard work, no excuses and breaking out of entitlement. Through student comments and snippets of other commencement speeches Williams had given, the video showed that he had truly been a role model to the students and a motivation to follow their “hopes and dreams.”

Whether the video simply stroked his ego or genuinely struck a nerve, Williams accepted the invitation on air a few days later and came to speak at the high school’s commencement. It was just another instance in the growing mythos of the NBC news anchor—that Williams exemplified not just a pretty face but a real person to whom students could look up. One of the most striking lines from the Hillwood High School video was a snippet from a previous commencement address where Williams stated, “Stop yourself before you say something to your followers—consider being a leader.”

Several days ago, it was revealed that Williams lied repeatedly about an instance during the Iraq War where his helicopter had been shot down. In one of Williams’ claims, a rocket-propelled grenade had hit his helicopter while flying in formation. The claim has been corroborated, morphed and discounted so many times over the past week that it’s seemingly impossible to know what really happened. The only apparent truth is that Williams was in a helicopter at some point and built a story off that experience.

Yet the media is acting as if he committed one of the most heinous acts in history. Outlets, primarily the Washington Post, are reporting on other stories Williams may have fabricated, hoping to draw in readers by throwing stones at a now defenseless colleague. All it takes is a Biblical example to describe why all the hatred toward Williams is wrong: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Williams does not deserve the vilification he has received in the press. Did he deserve to be suspended? Yes. He made a mistake and deserves according punishment. But to viciously attack a man’s reputation for doing his job and doing it quite well is wrong, especially when the attack is led by a press corps that has made similar, if not worse, mistakes.

What Williams did has a name: yellow journalism. It’s the sensationalism of a story in order to increase readers or viewers. News journalists frown upon yellow journalism because it violates the basic ethics of reporting the truth and only the truth.

But think of it this way: none of the claims Williams made were of events that did not actually happen. A helicopter was shot down and looters did loot after Hurricane Katrina. Williams just inserted himself into the events to make for a better story. He sensationalized in order to allow his viewers to relate to a common face, an everyman who has seen the horrors of tragedy and is willing to re-tell these horrors to those in the safety of their own homes.

Outside the press, Williams’ reputation is being destroyed by his own viewers, who are calling him a liar and a cheat. Yet everyone has done what Williams is accused of at one point in his or her life. People love to take others’ stories and make them their own by falsely claiming they were there at the time. How does starting a story with “One time I” really differ from “One time a friend of mine”? Both stories convey the basic facts of what happened—they just substitute the players involved to make them more personal.

Obviously, the difference is that Williams’ livelihood was made on telling stories, and with that comes a certain expected authenticity, but he still conveyed all of the information. We, as viewers, learned of the atrocities committed in New Orleans after Katrina, and we learned of the casualties of war. Those stories weren’t false or even embellished—they were just altered to give Williams more credibility.

In Williams’ commencement speech at Hillwood High School, he offered students the line, “It’s time to think about what you leave behind, the signs that you were here. You know this already; you’ll need grit and you’ll need character.”

It’s obvious at this point that Williams never listened to his own speeches. If he had, his “character” and being a “leader” would have stopped him long before he lied to a national audience. Yet the legacy he leaves behind should not be tarnished, though that will happen.

Williams, like all of us, is human, and lying or embellishing is part of human nature. But Williams is still one of the best news anchors this country has ever seen. He remains someone that people can look up to as a role model.