NBC News anchor Brian Williams has told different versions of a story about his experience on board a helicopter in 2006 during the war between Israel and Hezbollah, adding more questions about his reporting after he admitted embellishing a tale about the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
During a 2007 video interview with a Fairfield University student, Williams recalled “the war with Hezbollah in Israel a few years back, where there were Katyusha rockets passing just underneath the helicopter I was riding in.”
However, as the Washington Post noted on Sunday, Williams described his experience differently in a 2006 blog post. During his 2006 account, he described himself as being farther away from the rockets.
In the post, he wrote that he was in a helicopter 1,500 feet above ground when the pilot reported “some shelling” that had just occurred below them. The NBC anchor then described seeing rockets launched in the distance.
“The trails of smoke and dust visible out the window are where Katyusha rockets have landed — in this case in the uninhabited Israeli countryside, and in some cases they have set fire to the surrounding brush. The missiles are unguided and random. And plentiful,” he wrote in the blog post. “Then, I noticed something out the window. From a distance of six miles, I witnessed a rocket launch. A rising trail of smoke, then a second rocket launch, an orange flash and more smoke — as a rocket heads off toward Israel.”
During a 2006 appearance on “The Daily Show,” Williams told host Jon Stewart about the same experience.
“Here’s a view of rockets I have never seen, passing underneath us, 1,500 feet beneath us. And we’ve got the gunner doors on this thing,” Williams said.
He said that he asked the general with whom he was flying, “It wouldn’t take much for them to adjust the aim and try to do a ring toss right through our open doors, would it?”
Williams also told multiple versions of a story about his flight on a helicopter over Iraq during the 2003 invasion. The newsman claimed numerous times that the chopper he was on was hit by a rocket propelled grenade, but crew members who were there have said Williams wasn’t near the RPG attack.
And since Williams admitted that his 2003 story was bogus, his accounting of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has also been called into question.
I think Brian needs to stop riding in helicopters. Imagine the harrowing stories he’s been telling about heading out to the Hamptons on Friday afternoons in July.
Oh, FFS, I can’t stand Williams. He’s a covert conservative tool. But this shit is getting ridiculous.
The “questions” about his Katrina reporting have been disproven by photos and contemporaneous accounts. His hotel was surrounded by water and there were bodies floating in it.
As to the rest, he’s giving us a valuable lesson on how utterly unreliable memories formed under the influence of flight or fight hormones are, but no one wants to face that or the implications that follow from acknowledging that eyewitness testimony is of dubious value. So instead, there’s this pile-on.
A huge percentage of people insist they saw video of the second plane hitting the WTC on 9/11 when, in fact, it took days for that footage to surface. Dozens of people positively identified by rape victims have been acquitted by DNA evidence.
Memory is a far more complex thing than any of us want to admit. Much of what we think we remember is a story we put together days, weeks and months after the fact.
And yes, I now feel bad about having razzed Hillary about her recollection of that flight into Tuzla.
In 1066 around Hastings arrows blotted out the sun and some indeed hit one of the sides of the oxen-pulled cart he was traveling in.
Fibbing and little white lies, embellishing, these things can sort of be overlooked. Brian Williams is lying for some reason and now it is clear that he has been lying about just about everything of import.
He’s no Rush Limbaugh or Bill Oreilly and that is the problem, he is supposedly the honest and decent guy, not the typical blowhard false narrative douchebag.
Is a pretentious nice douchenozzle a better douchenozzle? Nope, Williams is now just an everyday average lying scumbag of he douchy variety.
He’s pathetic really.
Of import? Not sure how important his lies really are. But NBC knew that his account of the helicopter incident was false, because one of the pilots involved wrote to protest his story. Yet, no correction was ever made. Instead, he doubled down. After all, a good story sells and brings in the audience who wants more, more, more.
I’m not sure NBC will do anything here, because it is just as culpable.