San Francisco, Feb 11
Brian Williams, the
anchor of America's most watched network newscast, was never in a
chopper attacked by Iraqi forces as he claimed, though now he is really
being bombarded -- with criticism that threatens his career and the
credibility of his network.
Williams announced Saturday that he
was temporarily leaving "NBC Nightly News" just a few days after
admitting that the story he related several times on TV -- that he was
on board a helicopter in Iraq that was hit by rocket-propelled grenades
-- was not in fact what happened, but that he was actually on another
chopper that arrived an hour after the one that was hit.
His
confession, which he was forced to make after a flight engineer who was
traveling on the helicopter that was attacked questioned his story on
Facebook, has in turn led to a meticulous scrutiny of his career.
"I
don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one
aircraft from the other," he told his TV audience Feb 4 in making a
public apology for telling a story that was not true.
"I guess I
had assumed that all of the airframes took some damage because we all
went down," he said in an interview with the military newspaper Stars
and Stripes.
But the fake Iraq story turns out not to be the only controversial episode in his career.
In
2005, for example, he said he saw a body floating in front of the hotel
where he was staying in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck. For
that news coverage, NBC won a Peabody Prize, the TV and radio
equivalent of a Pulitzer.
But the manager of the Ritz Carlton
where he stayed said that neither she nor any of the hotel's employees
saw a body floating near the building, located in a neighbourhood that
largely escaped the widespread flooding.
Added to that episode were Williams' statements about a suicide in New Orleans' Superdome Stadium after Katrina.
The
55-year-old anchor said in a 2005 documentary that he had not witnessed
the tragedy, a story he changed last year, saying that he had indeed
seen a man throw himself off the highest part of the stadium.
NBC has reacted with surprise to these revelations and says it has opened an investigation into the misleading stories.
But
The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said in an article published
last weekend: "NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams
was constantly inflating his biography", and it even got to the point
where "it was a joke in the news division."
For Dowd, what
happened is symptomatic of the trivialising of television newscasts,
which are plagued these days, she said, "with cat, dog and baby videos,
weather stories and narcissism".
What Williams did and NBC's
reaction to it were also slammed this Monday by Time magazine, which
regretted that no one in the network sounded the alarm and said that an
internal investigation was no way to fix such a problem.
"Williams should be talking, not to his own staff, not to David Letterman, but to outside journalists," Time said.
For
Time, "NBC and Williams have a trust problem, which is therefore also a
business problem. Only openness will fix that -- and the later and more
grudgingly it comes, the less good it will do."
Williams,
meanwhile, temporarily withdrew from the "NBC Nightly News" Saturday,
promising that when he returns to the show he would continue working to
deserve the trust of those who believe in him and in his network.
