NYT: NBC Reviewing New Instance In Which Brian Williams May Have Lied

The NBC team investigating instances in which NBC anchor Brian Williams may have lied about his reporting have reportedly uncovered a new case in which Williams may have embellished tales about his experiences, according to the New York Times.

Unnamed sources told the Times that NBC has investigated a few times when Williams may have fabricated the facts about his reporting, including a previously unreported embellishment about events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring.

Williams was suspended as anchor of NBC’s “Nightly News” for six months starting in February after Williams admitted that he had lied about being on board a helicopter that took fire during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

According to the New York Times, the NBC investigation is still underway, and the network has not yet reached any conclusions.

The Times’ Ravi Somaiya wrote that it’s “not clear precisely which parts of Mr. Williams’s reporting from Tahrir Square have been scrutinized by NBC.”

Somaiya wrote about possible discrepancies in Williams’ accounts during February 2011:

In an appearance that month with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,”Mr. Williams described his reporting from the square. Speaking of clashes between protesters seeking the overthrow of the Egyptian government, and a pro-government group on horses and camels, he said he had “actually made eye contact with the man on the lead horse.” Mr. Stewart then referred to reports that the pro-government group had used whips. “Yeah,” Mr. Williams replied, “he went around the corner after I saw him, they pulled out whips and started beating human beings on the way.”

The NBC News report on the clash between the protesters that day did not show Mr. Williams in Tahrir Square during the protest. Subsequent reports said that Mr. Williams was reporting “from a balcony overlooking Tahrir Square,” rather than from inside the square itself, a description that matches footage that was broadcast, and that he repeated in an interview with The New York Times last year.