Brian’s sorry excuse

Blames ‘ego’ trip

In his f irst interview since he was suspended by NBC, Brian Williams blamed his erroneous reporting on his “egodriven” lifestyle and desire to be “sharper, funnier, quicker than anybody else.”

“What happened is clearly part of my ego getting the better of me,” the disgraced anchor admitted on Friday’s “Today” show. “This came from clearly a bad place, a bad urge inside me . . . a desire to better my role in a story I was already in. That’s what I’ve been tearing apart and unpacking and analyzing.

“To put myself in a better light, to appear better than I was, that’s the process here,” he told colleague Matt Lauer. “In our work, I have always treated words very carefully. It is clear that after work, when I got out of the building, when I got out of that realm, I used a double standard. Something changed, and I was sloppy, and I said things that weren’t true.”

Williams’ prerecorded mea culpa came the day after NBC announced he was being replaced by Lester Holt as the anchor of the “Nightly News.”

The 56yearold newsman has been suspended since February after an internal probe into his farfetched fibs revealed he had greatly embellished a story about a 2003 assignment in Iraq.

“It has been torture,” Williams explained, describing the months since he was shelved by NBC. “Looking back, it has been absolutely necessary. I have discovered a lot of things. I have been listening to and watching what amounts to the black box recordings from my career . . . basically 20 years of public utterances.”

Williams, who had been making at least $10 million a year, has been demoted to a breakingnews anchor at MSNBC for what sources say is “substantially less” pay.