More Brian Williams Lies

I think it's time for NBC to let go and move on.

Brian Williams' reputation as a journalist is beyond repair.

The guy should focus on screenplays, not news reports.

Let's call his penchant for telling tall tales "acting" rather than lying. Williams just needs to redirect his talents. He doesn't belong in NBC's news division.

Brian Williams perhaps ‘misremembered’ dangers of Katrina, hotel manager says

Three individuals told reporters that gangs never infiltrated the Ritz-Carlton, despite Williams’s claims. And DeGersdorff agreed.

“There absolutely was looting in the French Quarter,” [general manager of a mammoth Ritz-Carlton at the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, Myra] DeGersdorff recalled. “But I wouldn’t say they were gangs. … They were primarily individual looters or two or three buddies attempting to break into camera stores; it was unpleasant.” She said that “on more than one occasion,” the looters tried to get inside the hotel. At one point, they did “breach a door” but were “immediately” chased out. There were “maybe one or two of them,” she said.

This contrasts with Williams’s recollection, as recounted to historian Douglas Brinkley for his 2007 book, “The Great Deluge.” According to Brinkley, Williams told him that “armed gangs had broken into the 527-room hotel, brandishing guns and terrorizing guests. Williams, in fact, had seen his first corpse floating down Canal Street from his eighth-floor window earlier that day. Then fever consumed him.”

At some point — it’s unclear when — Williams said he camped out in a stairwell on a mattress. That surprised DeGersdorff. “I can tell you that at no time did any of my people report any sightings of any bodies,” she said. “I witnessed no bodies floating. … He may have simply misremembered. But I can tell you no one broke out in the hotel with dysentery. I did have mattresses in the stairwells, sure. Did he walk into a stairwell and lay down? He could have, but Ritz-Carlton doesn’t invite its guests to sleep in the stairwell, so we certainly didn’t give him access.”

Brian Williams Falsely Claimed 'We Saw The Guy Who...Put A Round Through The Back Of A Chopper' In Very First 2003 Report

In the initial NBC broadcast where he described his 2003 Iraq reporting mission, embattled NBC anchor Brian Williams falsely claimed that “we saw the guy . . . [who] put a round through the back of a chopper,” which he further and incorrectly claimed was “the Chinook [helicopter] in front of us.”

Williams filed three reports from Kuwait for NBC News on March 26, 2003. The first was a live broadcast at noon Eastern, the second at 6:30 pm Eastern on the NBC Nightly News, and the third later that night in prime time on NBC Dateline.

A review of all three transcripts (obtained from Nexis courtesy of MRC) shows that as the day wore on, Williams’s claims, and in particular the claim that he saw the guy who fired the RPG that downed the chopper “in front of us,” became less expansive.

Over the subsequent years, however, that process reversed. Williams reverted to increasingly dramatic and even less accurate versions of the claim.

Brian Williams' account of '70s N.J. robbery questioned

A longtime borough restaurateur doesn't believe embattled NBC anchorman Brian Williams's claim that he was robbed at gunpoint in Red Bank sometime in the late '70s while selling Christmas trees from the back of a truck.

"To be robbed in front of a church? Red Bank just wasn't like that," said Daniel Murphy Jr., 71, who owns Danny's Steakhouse and has lived in the borough since his family moved there in 1949. "It was the kind of town where as a kid I'd leave the house in the morning and not come back until 8, 9 o'clock at night and you never worried about safety."

..."To be robbed in front of a church like that, it would have been in the Register," Murphy said, referring to the Red Bank Register newspaper, which went out of business in the late 1980s. Red Bank Police Chief Darren McConnell said in an email yesterday that it would be very difficult to try to find any record of an armed robbery in Red Bank from the 1970s without knowing the month and year that the crime allegedly took place.

Williams may be a good storyteller, but he's not a good journalist.

One could argue, especially in terms of all the stolen valor issues, that Williams isn't a good person.

Maybe his storytelling is a mental health matter. Maybe he's not a bad guy, just sick.