I updated Friday’s Brian Williams story to reflect some of the late-afternoon news about his situation at NBC News. Williams has been NBC’s golden goose for a long time – he’s popular with advertisers, he’s a company man, he supports NBC’s talent and their corporate suits. He gets paid handsomely for it too ($10 million a year). Which might be why NBC News had no idea how to proceed with the clusterwhoops that has unraveled over the past week. On Friday, NBC News’ president Deborah Turness issued a public statement saying that Williams had apologized to NBC corporate and the NBC News staffers for bringing so much heat to the news division. Turness also said that NBC would be investigating Williams, in what I’m assuming will be an in-house OMG-how-many-times-has-he-lied hush-hush investigation. It’s also being said that NBC has told Williams to cool it with any outside appearances (like being a guest on The Daily Show or The Tonight Show) until further notice.
Meanwhile, the knives are out. And it’s not just limited to NBC’s in-house investigation either. People – mostly conservative bloggers, media watchdog groups and anyone in News Corp – are poring over every public statement Williams has ever made, in interviews, chat show appearances, etc. There are already some problems. People have been Truth-Squading the hell out of Williams’ various stories about what went down in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Williams told several different versions of what sounds like a completely fabricated story about a man committing suicide inside the Superdome. Williams also told stories of armed gangs running amok during Katrina, when those stories were just… really conflated, if not totally false.
Page Six also ran a series of stories questioning the authenticity of several other anecdotes from Williams’ TV appearances. Like, he claimed he left a dying friend’s bedside to cover the death of Princess Diana. He also claimed that as a teenage volunteer fireman, he rescued either one puppy or two puppies – the number of puppies changes every time he tells the story. #Wasthereevenonepuppy #BrianWilliamsMisremembersPuppies
And finally, as the clusterwhoops grows each passing day, Williams has finally realized (for once) that he should not be the story. He issued a statement on NBCNews.com on Saturday saying that “it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions.” He’s says: “I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days, and Lester Holt has kindly agreed to sit in for me to allow us to adequately deal with this issue. Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.” Ooooh, Lester Holt. I LOVE LESTER HOLT. If they do fire Williams, Lester Holt should get the anchor position. I’ve always had Holt on the top of my list of Matt Lauer replacements for the Today Show, but having Holt permanently replace Williams doesn’t sound too bad.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
He doesn’t realize his career is over, does he, bless his heart. Regain public confidence? One more little lie he can tell himself…
Spot on.
My thoughts exactly. Yeah just a couple days and it will all be fine…right.
He has been very lucky in life. This is a man that has 18 credit hours of college and managed to be the top rated nightly news anchor and takes home a multi million dollar salary. Part of that is based on his looks but it was also 75% being part of the boys club.
He has been protected for years by playing the game. Why would he think this would take him down?
The same can be said for Matt Lauer .. he also doesn’t have a degree ,the Today show is a mess , it is obvious that he is the cause but he is still there. Cause he plays the game well.
Brian Williams will take a break until Aug. Return to anchor in Sept and act like nothing happened.
I never knew that so I checked both of these douchebags’ bios on Wiki. Both Williams and Lauer went to community college and never finished college before making it big. Lauer received his college degree from Ohio University at the age of 39. Meanwhile, my generation has taken out millions of dollars in student loans to go to college and graduate school and many still cannot find a job. Yep, these guys definitely know how to play the game and probably stepped on a lot of people’s backs to get to where they are today.
I feel like he won’t come back on air. This is just to stop the drama.
He could always get a job at Fox “News”!
(Ok, to be fair I should credit Bill Moyers, who joked that they’d already hired him!)
TrustMe,
Do you mean Bill Maher? I just can’t imagine Bill Moyers saying that.
His next job should be writing for The Onion…
The Onion has pretty high standards for its writers. I don’t think Brian will make the cut.
Cannibel, Right on. No way is he Onion material.
I am pissed that these men who didn’t finish college or get degrees in communications or journalism, have network TV high level anchor jobs.
I am truly ticked off.
Many of my friends spent years earning communications and journalism degrees from various NY Colleges, as well as doing internships for networks, only to find no jobs, ( Yet this man has a high level anchor job…”.wtf! )
Why doesn’t NBC just call him a Newsreader because that’s basically what he is.
I hope he’s fired, but what they’ll probably do is give him NBC News Specials and take him off the nightly anchor desk.
He suxs. Can’t stand him. He’s finished regardless. I was listening to a radio show and most of the callers and military people who phoned in ,were angry as hell. They want him FIRED!
Exactly.
He’s a glorified news-reader-celebrity, not a real journalist. I wish he would just say it – I LIED. That would show more integrity than self-suspending himself in an effort to let it all blow over.
I’ve actually really liked him the past years and he was to me a news anchor that was bearable to watch. But this is quite dissapointing and if the lies are true (who are we kidding? They definitely are) then yeah he should be fired. I also wish he’d just own up to not telling the truth at all. Sometimes people say a certain lie for so long that they just get used to that certain story as being the truth. So dissapointing :/. And yesss, I love Lester!
You are mentally ill if you tell yourself you saw a body float past you, and end up believing it. Brian, you told some fat ones, and now no one likes you or trusts you anymore. Good day, sir.
I don’t necessarily say that he believed his lies, I’m just saying some people get so used to them that it becomes normal to them…and they consider the consequences less and less until caught. I think he’s just avoiding admitting that he made them up, but who knows? None of us are in his mind. He just needs to step down completely.
Mmhmm, sounds a bit Lance Armstrong-esque. Minus the threats and intimidation.
It’s disgusting how the 1% get paid millions of dollars to read off of teleprompters then act entitled as if they are the only ones who can do a particular job. I wouldn’t say that anyone can do this job, but a lot of people can, they just aren’t given the opportunity. I really hate what journalism has become.
+1000.
There’s a great movie from the 80s or 90s called “Broadcast News”. It’s a funny, stinging portrait of today’s corporate news departments and their love for uncredentialed pretty boy news anchors. William Hurt, Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks, with Jack Nicholson and Joan Cusack in small but hilarious roles. Tom Brokaw was really angry about it and said it was totally untrue–wonder what he’d say now.
One of my favorite and most quotable movies ever, angie. “What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! What’s he gonna sound like?”
As disappointed/horrified as I am with this situation, I’m a little bummed Williams didn’t take this a step further and use the Tonight Show clips to insist that he actually is a bona fide rap star. And I’m going to choose to look on the bright side: Lester!
Self-suspension is the black hole Dr. Nancy Snyderman went down. She eventually re-emerged and is back on the air. It shouldn’t have worked for her, and it’s not going to work for Brian Williams. His “embellishments” have decimated any trust or goodwill he had with the public.
Agreed.
@punkymomma– I actually believe the self-suspension will work, if he is smart enough to stay out of the spotlight for the right amount of time. Say 3 months or so, come back at the end of Summer. A few days ain’t going to cut it…
Exactly He’s a Newsreader and he should have stuck to letting the writers write the truth and just reading the TelePrompter.
I have a friend who was working as a model at a car show and someone from NBC news spotted her and hired her for a new show they were doing,because of her look. But the thing is she really did have a Degree in Journalism and she was a smart lady. The NBC Show failed but she was hired for a short time. She went from car show model to hosting a local NBC show in a matter of days….lol
Still the whole aspect of how they found her to host the show made me laugh at what a joke the process must be.
I hope Brian is fired,
p.s. I also had a guy friend who was a model, in NY who told me he was approached by a producer of News at one of the big four networks who told him they’d train him for the news division to anchor, because he had a good look for an anchor. He turned them down, said he wasn’t interested.
I’m truly disgusted.
“Several days”, huh?! What a sacrifice!
Sidenote, why do these people use the short form ‘mis’ in front of their actions instead of admitting that what they did or said was wrong. ‘Misremembered’ sounds so cosy compared to ‘lied’ or ‘fabricated’ which are the proper words for what he did.
Bullseye. “Misspoke” is another one. You LIED. You MADE IT UP. You didn’t “misremember.”
I think there are instances where you can misspeak, as in you offered an opinion and/or related information without collecting all the facts first. But the euphemism in the context of bare-faced lies is annoying.
Right, I suppose you can misremember, too, but in this case, I think he just made sh$t up.
He definitely made stuff up. I think somewhere along the line he started believing his own lies.
He’s bowdlerising his own sins!
Because ‘lying’ or ‘fabricating’ implies a deliberate action. Saying that he ‘misremembered’ a story makes it seem as though he was, say, caught in a panic when the event occurred and remembered things differently from what actually happened. So i guess it’s a way of saving his own hiney. There’s no way of getting around a fabricated story or a deliberate lie about him surviving being shot down in Iraq, but misremembering it leaves room for ambiguities.
Mis-remembering or lying seems to put you at a disadvantage in delivering news.
I don’t think it helps him, in general.
Tifzlan: that is the point. ‘misremembering’ is PR speak for extricating him from this fix.
Unfortunately for Brian ‘Walter Mitty’ Williams, others have been able to debunk his version of events AND to place him in the timeline such that we know he was present in each scenerio long after the danger had past. Therefore his version are lies and fabrications.
Mere mortals can say “I didn’t get my story straight” but (people pretending to be) a journalist — especially at the level of national news broadcasting — rarely have that luxury, nor should they. Journalism isn’t the problem here; real journalists have skills and integrity. Celebrity status and an inflated sense of self-importance (especially relative to skills) are the problem.
I totally agree with all of you on all your points. Just trying to explain his thought process, maybe? But, like LAK said, too bad for him that people can debunk both his stories and his excuses so it didn’t really work out for him to say that he ‘misremembered’ his stories.
OMG LAK, you are hilarious.
Brian ‘Walter Mitty’ Williams – cracking me up. Thanks!
Exactly–it wasn’t me, it was my pesky brain that keeps malfunctioning and misremembering. Such a hassle. A side note–I wonder how many other words have 3 Ms in them.
Mammary
Mismanagement
Mammal
Memorium
Mimosas. Oh wait…
Spiked-Momoas.
a minimum of 3 mimi/momoa-mimosas to misremember
I’m so sad this is unraveling right now. Brian Williams is on my silver fox list but he haas dropped a few notches bc of his apparent selective amnesia.
How precious. He’s giving himself a time-out.
He went to his balloon.
*giggles*
The nytimes says that NBC was so confident in Willians that they didn’t have a successor lined up. Why so little appreciation for Lester Holt?
And then Maureen Dowd: “When Williams was declared the hair apparent to Tom Brokaw…” Do people admire his hair? Is that a thing?
I think it is because Lester Holt can Slow Jam the News..
Maureen Dowd thinks she is cuter than other people think she is. Unless it was a spelling error.
I think she’s super cute.
Multiply that by a million and you have her opinion of herself.
Yes, she has a certain heir about herself, doesn’t she?
LMAO, you’re so clever.
I told my BF about you. He thinks I have an imaginary friend, lol.
Ha! I was *just* asking my bf what the opposite of elevate would be. He asked me why, and all I could come up with was “because all I do is lower the commenting quality on my smart imaginary friend’s posts”. 😀
Sorry but I can’t stand Lester Holt so I hope he’s not the “one”.
If Brian Williams were black or Hispanic or non white male, he’d be Gone by now!
He has become popular outside his news desk. The appearances on Fallon.. all the people following him on Social media. It is a matter of time before people look at you in a different way. I don’t know how he will recover.
I think he is pretty much done. He became too interested in the celebrity culture and being a part of that. Now it is costing him.
RIght On – our junk facile celebrity culture helped in his demise. For all the worldliness and profundity these fools affect most of them are quite shallow and brittle. It’s not like he holds midnight tete-a-tetes with the likes of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.
I’m politically liberal, but I have never prescribed to a “group think” mindset. I will criticize liberal politicians and journalists when they deserve it. Liberals should not protect Williams right now nor should they criticize conservative outlets who are going over Williams’ quotes with a fine-toothed comb. Sure, conservative talking heads are being hypocrites, but what Williams did was unethical and grounds for immediate termination. If NBC has any credibility left it should terminate Williams by the end of this month after its so-called “internal investigation”.
I’m with you, and it’s a clear if a conservative news anchor had pulled this stunt the liberal pundits would be piling on with gusto.
What’s more interesting to me isn’t the left or right angle, but the thing in our psychology that pushes some of us to invent stories about scary things happening to us. The recent UVA rape hoax, hate crime hoaxes, people pretending to be war vets, there was a fake 9-11 widow who became a major public face but was later ‘outed’ as having no connection to the event, believe it or not there are even Holocaust fakers.
I find it fascinating and truly wonder what mechanism triggers this kind of tall tale-telling. Someone in Williams’ position had to know if he was ever caught out it would be a career-ender. That’s a heavy-duty risk to take…and for what?
I would wager to guess that the highest % of commenters here are more left than right and are displeased with him and think he should resign or be fired. So why preface this as if the opposite is occurring? There are MANY occasions where FOX news people are caught in lies, but it’s expected. There isn’t a liberal land swell calling for him to stay.
I’m a staunch conservative and think he should stay. It gives us more ammo to knock down you godless commie pinkos.
I knew you were behind the OP, SARAH!
Pew pew pew!
I would like to think he is done. But then I recall how Soups Snyderman got to come back after she completely discredited herself.
He needs to leave the anchor’s desk for forever! What a lying liar.
Brian Williams needs to leave his desk permanently. He has lost all credibility and has cost NBC their credibility as well. A few days is not going to help him. More and more stories of his (apparently well-known) embellishments and lies are coming to light. A few days is not going to make things better.
NBC needs to assume a huge part of the blame for this scandal.
They should have fact-checked Willams’ actual involvement in these tales of bravery and desperation.
Surely he travels with a crew who could have verified at least some of the self-involvement he claimed to have had in the news.
I suspect that NBC was perfectly content with Williams heroic facade and having a celebrity swashbuckling news anchor.
The only reason that Williams hasn’t been $#!T-canned already is because they’re afraid he’ll spill his guts and implicate many others at NBC.
I miss Peter Jennings. 😔
me too.
Me too.
I wasn’t aware that Brian Williams was liberal. I didn’t think he was conservative either, just blandly establishment.
Anyway, as everyone knows, he has to go, whatever his politics are.
Yeah, I haven’t commented on this story at all because I’m not a fan of corporate media whatsoever, but I find it oddly humorous that he’s considered (or identifies as) liberal.
Maybe anything that isn’t fascist, oligarchy-worship is now considered liberal?
🎯
Exactly what mimif said. Yep.
NBC and MSNBC are considered to be “liberal”, but I agree that it is more of an establishment corporate network than a liberal network. The people who work for these corporations can be left-leaning or right-leaning, but they are all part of the elite establishment which is out of touch with everyday folks. At the end of the day, all of these networks have a corporate agenda and that is to do whatever it takes to generate the highest ratings.
+1
+2 divided by one pseudo liberal
And +3 for the hare.
😂
I find it scary that we can identify the political party of someone who is supposed to be delivering an unbiased report.
If NBC is liberal and Fox is conservative we can assume the truth of the matter lies somewhere in between the two.
Or perhaps completely outside of the political box.
I LOVE Lester Holt, too!!
Me too! I hope he gets the gig! He also has a son in the business, I think in Chicago saw a story on them Lester seems like a great, believable guy!
Or maybe they will bring Ann Curry out of the dark hole she has been in, wasn’t her deal that she was more journalist and less Katie Couric?
I think it’s simple. He’s just a liar. We all know them. Those people who lie about situations just so they will have a good story to tell. He likes the attention and I think if you went through the majority of statements told by celebrities you would probably find that most of them are lies.
What intrigues me about this whole situation is the fact that he runs the NBC nightly news and he’s not a real news journalist. He doesn’t have the education or evidently the experience to support his current job role.
I love, love Lester Holt. I’ve wanted him to replace Lauer too. His voice is so deep and smooth. Good looking but no pretty boy”
Yeah, he’s never coming back. It’s a wrap. A LOT of people won’t watch him anymore and that will be reflected in lower ratings, thus fewer advertisers. It’s all about the dollar.
He’s done.
And here I thought it all boiled down to journalistic integrity.
Williams had it all, why did he do this? He was beloved and paid millions. Now he is screwed. And his demise will be long and excruciating- just think what SNL, Comedy Central and comedians will do to him, not to mention the shredding on social media. And for a guy who loved his own popularity, his has got to be painful. He’s done.
It was when he was first getting his serious news legs, he lied his butt off, to give himself a leg up over other anchors and news people. Can’t stand him.
He’s finished as a serious newsman.
This all reminds me of the character that Jon Lovitz used to play on SNL as the President of Pathological Liars Anonymous. “I lied about my age and joined the army, I was 13 at the time. I went to Vietnam and I was injured catching a mortar shell in my teeth. And they made me a three star General. And then I got a job in journalism writing for the National Enquirer…Geographic! Yeah, I was making twenty thousand a ye…a month! In fact I won the Pulitzer Prize that year! That’s the ticket.”
Life imitates art, all on NBC.
I wonder if Jon Stewart will touch this. I know he and Brian Williams are buddies, but this is the type of clusterf*ck The Daily Show would excel in covering.
Yeah, I was thinking about that too. On a personal level, Jon Stewart must be disappointed in Williams. They seem to be chummy and Williams appeared on the Daily Show many times. I believe that Stewart will touch on this subject. It has become too big of a journalism fail story not to, but it will be interesting to see how Stewart tackles the downfall of his friend.
I SO wish Stephen Colbert was still on air to cover this on “The Colbert Report”!!
If it turns out that he did indeed make up all of the stories suspected to be fabricated, I really wonder if he is a pathological liar. That is an insane amount of lying to do, on the national news no less.
I wonder, too. My other question is, did the producers and everyone else behind the nightly news encourage this? It’s hard to keep secrets in the kind of work he does. He would have had a team following him around for much of the Katrina stuff, and the helicopter ride. It seems like some of those people should be able to come out and say if these things are true. If they are not true, I don’t think any of them will throw him under the bus. I have two family members who work for the news, following a “journalist”. One is a camera man, and the other is a producer. They are a pretty tight knit group, and considering how hard they work to essentially do invisible work, they are very loyal to the journalists they work with.
So, if he is a pathological liar, I guess we will never know exactly where the line is. I would assume that the NBC team is more aware of his lying than we are.
I am probably more of a conservative, but I really liked him. He seemed pretty affable, and his reporting didn’t bother me too much. I really have a problem with these lies. As the face of a news program with a huge reach, he has some major responsibility. How many people were further affected by the lies about Katrina? It was plenty bad enough on it’s own, but those types of embellishments make people lose faith in humanity.
Fire this fool. His credibility is shot to hell. Nobody is going to believe anything he reports any more.
anyone else wonder if Turness is going to be tossed onto her tookus too?
DM has articles on how BW’s story kept changing about a rocket missile almost hitting the copter he was in while flying in Israel, and how he was lucky to be alive and how he was held at gunpoint and robbed in the 1970s while selling Xmas trees in his childhood hometown of Red Bank, NJ. They have interviews with residents who don’t believe him because such things didn’t happen there in the 70s. They say it was so safe during that time that kids would walk around in the dark alone at night, no one locked their car doors, and that it was a very safe town.
“‘That wasn’t a bad job, until a guy came up and stuck a .38-caliber pistol in my face and made me hand over all the money. Merry Christmas, right? Of course, I suddenly appreciated the other jobs I thought I hated,’ Williams recalled when he told New Jersey Monthly in 2008. ”
Apparently, his many lies include how he kept facing life-threatening situations, like how he was looking down the barrel of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher as it tried to kill him or how gangs would come after him, and whatnot. Ridiculous.
What a Walter Mitty this guy is.
I’d be interested to see the police report for that robbery…I mean if he really was robbed at gunpoint, he would have called the police right? Even if Brian Williams didn’t himself, the church he was raising money for by selling the Christmas trees would have contacted the authorities due to the whole armed robber thing.
–They should give the news anchor job to Ann Curry!
There’ll be no police report because it never happened.
The man is a compulsive liar who felt compelled to pass himself off as some sort of tough guy.
Initially, I thought it was purely hubris and that Williams felt that he was too respected to ever be challenged.
Now I think he may have some sort of mental health disorder where he conjures up these incidents and eventually convinces himself that they actually occurred.
In either case he’s unfit to be anchoring the network news.
Fascinating that he’s gotten do far on a pack of lies. He must have some strange psychological condition. He may be a narcissist who has delusions of grandeur. And that’s what did him in but it’s also probably what caused him to be successful and charismatic, and people just bought it.
I thought he was a normal down to earth guy but now when I look back at his appearances on Fallon, of course wih handsight, he strikes me as too smooth, too self satisfied.
There was also this weird thing that happened a while ago, where he said that he couldn’t fly out to join the other anchors in Europe- I can’t remember what it was for- but there was some sort of weather related event in the U.S. I dont think it was Katrina. But it was something kind of big and I remember at the time thinking, he’s kind of full of it. And now I bet, yeah he was totally full of it.
Brian’s tale-telling is similar to what 5 year olds do, i.e. “A giant stepped on my broccoli so I couldn’t eat it” or “I saw the Easter Bunny laying eggs in the garden & he didn’t know I could see him” or “I already know how to drive a car. I did it once when my Mom wasn’t looking.”
It really seems as if these glamorized news-readers come to think of themselves as part of the news, or even (worse) the creator of that news, the composer of it, so that at some point they begin to revise the news stories they report, punch them up a bit, the way we regular writers do when revising our fiction. So they add a floating body here or a suicide there, create a near-death experience they had on a helicopter ride, or describe puppies (or dying friends) that never existed. And then they really ARE a part of the news they report because they actually have created it. At that point, both they and the news program itself are corrupted beyond repair. Nothing can be done to make it right except for them to leave.
Brian Williams is damaged goods and will need to be replaced. I also love Lester Holt and think he would be a great replacement.
There is a broader issue here with the quality of TV news reporting in the U.S…pandering to special interest groups (political parties, advertisers). There is also an issue with adequate coverage of international issues. I watch France 24, Deutshe Welle etc.-there are English language editions- to find out what the heck is going on.
I’m late on this but whatever.
Firstly who cares about the degree? Plenty of highly successful people do not hold college degrees. It’s pretty clear to anyone paying attention that a college degree isn’t necessarily a requirement for wealth, happiness or success.
Secondly, that guy has balls for lying about being shot down. Must’ve thought he was untouchable.
I hope he goes down in flames for his lies..
Some people just blithely lie whenever it suits them, to make their point or make themselves look good or get what they want or whatever. Kim Kardashian is a chronic liar at all levels, but people keep tossing money at her. Kim’s lies are just annoying. The real problems are chronic liars who get into serious positions of power. They typically are quite charming. Ronald Reagan was one- it’s hard to find a President who hasn’t seriously lied at one time or another, but Reagan got to the point during his campaigns and while in the White House where he was routinely lying about things that mattered. Every day. Journalists originally scrambled to find verification of his statements and when there was none or the relevant agencies (even the Pope once!) confirmed that the exact opposite was true- his people would just say he “mis-spoke”. The lie was front page, but the revelation that it was a lie was buried in tiny print later. People die when Presidents “mis-speak”. The lies were so frequent that nobody could keep up with them. But I would see the lies repeated as gospel truth by local editorials in support of more murder and mayhem and other harmful things for years even though I knew they had been discredited long ago. Few people would assume that a President would lie so often and so easily with none of the usual tell-tale signs. But he did.
Reagan had learned to make things up when he was the “color man” on radio sports broadcasts back in the days before tv. He was fed minimal details of how the game was going, and he would make up all the rest to make it exciting. He continued the practice of making up stories to illustrate his points as a popular political speaker for General Electric, and that carried over to his elective political career. He probably didn’t even think of it as lying and was baffled when anybody complained about it. He may very well have come to believe the lies; some people revise reality in their heads very easily, like small children.
I think Sarah Palin is another charming liar, but still not quite on Reagan’s scale. She didn’t get a chance to do that level of damage, though. The important thing to notice is that usually politicians can lie on a grand scale and still get re-elected and remain well liked. Many people pay attention to the charm and don’t seem to care so much about the lies.
Not sure how it will play out with this news fellow, since his job depends on how ticked his bosses are with him and that’s a different dynamic. But people really are likely to forget. His big mistake was the combat lie, since people are touchier about such things especially if they or people they love have been in combat. False puppy rescues are easier to forgive and forget.