The false rehabilitation of Brian Williams
It’s been more than a year since Brian Williams,, has been back on the air at MSNBC. His public stance was of a man chastened, humbled, and grateful to have another ꧟shot.
Would anyone be surprised to learn t🍨hat this, too, is not quite the tꩵruth?
, MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell, whose nightly 10 p.m. show is currently No. 2 in cable news ratings, may be push𒀰ed out for Williams. “It’s the worst-kept secret at MSNBC,” a source told Page Six. “Brian even acknowledged when he got the 11 p.m. show that it would be temporary.” Williams reportedly crowed that his great friend Andy Lac🎀k, chairman of NBC News, would make sure of it.
How can this be? J✨ournalists caught fabricating, embellishing or simply not♑ fact-checking have lost their careers. Dan Rather left CBS News in 2006 after a controversial story that relied upon false National Guard documents. Jayson Blair was fired from the New York Times in 2003 for stories that were invented or plagiarized, a travesty that also cost then-executive editor Howell Raines his job. Journalist Stephen Glass was fired from The New Republic in 1998 for fabricating, in parts or in whole, 27 of 41 articles for the magazine.
Yet Brian Williams is held to a different standard, despite indisputable membership in this rog🌳ue’s gallery. Among his ma🐎ny lies:
Two days 🌠after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, on NBC Nightly News: “Now, people might be hearing about SEAL Team 6. I happen to have the great honor of flying into Baghdad with them at💫 the start of the war.”
On “The Late S𝔉how with David Letterman,” nearly two years later: “About six weeks after the bin Laden raid, I got a white envelope and in it was a thank-you note, unsigned. And attached to it was a piece of the fuselage — the fuselage — from the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard.”
To hist🤡orian Douglas Brinkley for his 2007 book : While covering Hurricane Katrina, Williams saw “armed gangs” roving his five-star hotel, that he saw “his first corpse floating down Canal Street” from his window, that he slept on a mattress in a ཧstairwell, that he contracted dysentery but declined an IV and somehow recovered on his own.
“Here’s a fact: 25 years ago tonight, Tom Brokaw and I were at the Berlin Wall.” This statement, from a gala on Nov. 8, 2014, is but one version Williams has told over the years, which has reportedly driven Brokaw crazy. Bro𒈔kaw alone covered the Waꦑll’s fall for NBC. Williams arrived a day later.
Will🙈iams only compoun𓃲ded his lies in 2015, while on six months’ suspension without pay.
“Did somethi🔯ng happen to my head?” . “Ma𒁏ybe I had a brain tumor.”
💙Incredibly, despite an internal investigation that uncovered at least 10 lies told over more than a decade, NBC gave Williams a breaking-news chair at MSNBC — a position that demands extemporaneous speech.
Williams, whose stentorian delivery calls to mind characters such as Ted Baxter and Ron Burgundy, has committed several gaffes since returning to MSNBC. Most recently, he rhapsodized about “the beauty of our weapons” ꩵas the US bombed Syria, and has slammed the prevalence of “fake news.”
Pre-ꦏelection, the left-leaning MSNBC had been planning to pivot to hard news. Post-Trump, they’ve doubled down on punditry, to their great advantage.
It’s hard to believe൲ that not one executive is mulling their greatest contradiction: How can they employ an anch🦋or known for pomposity, grandiosity and lies while decrying these very traits in the American president?