Photos published online in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina show flood waters surrounding the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New Orleans, where NBC anchor Brian Williams has said he saw a body float by his room.
A Louisiana newspaper raised questions on Friday about the story Williams had told about the body. Some of Williams’ Hurricane Katrina anecdotes came under scrutiny on conservative news sites after the news anchor was forced to apologize this week for a bogus story he’d repeatedly told about coming under fire aboard a helicopter in Iraq in 2003.
The Advocate newspaper reported that Williams had claimed in a 2006 interview that he’d seen a body floating by his hotel while covering the 2005 hurricane.
“When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams said at the time.
The newspaper noted that the French Quarter was spared from the kind of devastating flooding that the rest of New Orleans suffered in the hurricane.
But later Friday, the Advocate surfaced photos and a press account published in the storm’s aftermath that did show water outside of the Ritz Carlton.
Williams specifically referenced the Ritz Carlton Hotel as the location where he saw a body in a 2005 blog post.
“I remember the body outside the Ritz Carlton Hotel… I remember the bodies floating by face-down in the water,” he wrote. “Back then, in those frantic and lawless early days of the crisis, the living were preoccupied with their own continued survival. The sight was horrifying then, and has lost none of its impact with the passage of time.”
In other words, the character assassination pig pile is already backfiring on the conservative media.
That’s why true or not, this is all beginning to have the whiff of another Swift Boating campaign by some interested parties, with an incentive, though not clear, of throwing more logs on the fire. I have no idea. It just strikes me as a full court effort to dig endlessly to discredit another presumably “liberal” persona and take out the competition. He may have been a cheerleader for the war in Iraq, I get that he offends many of us progressives on that issue alone, but this has the feel of rightwing pile-on to me. If you google this story you see the usual suspects doing most of the pile on. Rags like Daily Caller, Brietbart, Right Wing Watch, etc. They are the ones pushing this story the most, and having a field day at it. Its all a fucking ratings game anyway for most of them. Maybe I’m wrong, and there is something to be leery of, but for all the Faux Nooze bullshit day in and day out that never gets called out…how can this be anything but hair-on-fire hysteria over something that seems relatively mild in comparison to all the daily crap we’re exposed to by our lofty fucking media bozos.
The Ritz Carlton is adjacent to the French Quarter, not IN the French Quarter. Walking distance, the RC is about the same distance to the Dome as to Jackson Square
Precisely, which is why other allegedly “liberal” news sources like CNN can’t resist joining the pig pile either.
Meanwhile, the entire Faux team blatantly pushed the “no-go zone” lies a couple weeks ago and never got even close to this level of treatment.
I was mad that Brian Williams might have really lied, but when Dan Rather came out in his defense I decided to give his story a chance. The new governor of Mass. made up a story about a fisherman, and he was still elected. William’s helicopter may have been fired upon, and he embellished the story to make it seem more dangerous. Who knows what the mind does in situations in a war. He went to Iraq during the height of the war, which was very dangerous. That in itself should be a story to tell.