NBC’s Williams criticized, mocked for false tale
NBC News anchor Brian Williams was the story Thursday, his credibility threatened because he falsely claimed he had been in a helicopter hit by a grenade during the Iraq war.
NBC News officials would not say whether their top on-air personality would face disciplinary action. Williams became an online punching bag overnight.
Tweets with #BrianWilliamsMemories and #BrianWilliamsMisremembers joked that he blew up the Death Star, saved someone from a polar bear and flew with Wonder Woman in her invisible helicopter. Photoshopped pictures showed Williams reporting from the moon and riding shotgun with O.J. Simpson in his Ford Bronco.
“How could you expect anyone who served in the military to ever see this guy onscreen again and not feel contempt? How could you expect anyone to believe he or the broadcast he leads has any credibility?” wrote critic David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun.
Williams apologized Wednesday for telling the story again a week earlier during a “Nightly News” tribute to a veteran he befriended during a 2003 reporting trip to Iraq. Before expressing his regrets on the air, Williams did so online and in an interview with Stars & Stripes.
In his apology, Williams said that he had been on a helicopter that was behind the one that had taken fire, and that he had inadvertently conflated the two.
His story has morphed through the years. Shortly after the incident, Williams described on NBC how he was traveling in a group of helicopters forced down in the Iraq desert. On the ground, he learned the Chinook in front of him “had almost been blown out of the sky.”
In a 2013 appearance on David Letterman, Williams said that two of the four helicopters he was traveling with had been hit by ground fire, “including the one I was in.”
Williams’ story was first questioned in posts to the “Nightly News” Facebook page. It’s a touchy topic: Members of the military who are wounded or come under fire consider themselves members of a brotherhood, said retired Army Col. Pete Mansoor, a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “It smacks of stolen valor,” Mansoor said.