NBC news anchor Brian Williams is in trouble after telling a faulty story about his involvement in an episode during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Over the years, Williams has claimed several times that he was in a Chinook helicopter that was struck by enemy fire and had to make a crash landing. But based on the recollections of service members involved in the incident, Williams actually arrived on the scene about an hour after the helicopter was downed.
When Williams' story surfaced again last week during a tribute to veterans at a New York Rangers hockey game, several Iraq veterans who were present that day disputed Williams recollection.
“Sorry dude, I don’t remember you being on my aircraft,” wrote Lance Reynolds on Facebook. “I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened.”
The news outlet
Stars and Stripes initially reported the controversy. On Wednesday night, Williams made a formal apology during a broadcast of
NBC Nightly News, calling it a “bungled attempt” to pay tribute to military men and women who “served while I did not.”
“I hope they know they have my greatest respect and also now my apology.”
But that apology appears to have been
a beginning rather than an end to the story.
On Thursday, his real problems started.
A host of military veterans and pundits came forward on television and social media, challenging Mr. Williams’s assertion that he had simply made a mistake when he spoke, on several occasions, about having been in a United States military helicopter forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003. Some went so far as to call for his resignation.
In his apology, Mr. Williams said that he had been on a different helicopter, behind the one that had sustained fire, and that he had inadvertently “conflated” the two. The explanation earned him not only widespread criticism on radio and TV talk shows, but widespread ridicule on Twitter, under the hashtag “#BrianWilliamsMisremembers.”
Williams appears to have fallen prey to the old tongue-in-cheek adage, "don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story." The notion that Williams retold the story several times—including an extensive recounting of it on David Letterman in 2013—has continually vexed veterans who were involved in the mission that day.
“When he was on the air on the Letterman show, I was going crazy,” [Christopher] Simeone said. “I was thinking ‘This guy is such a liar and everyone believes it.’ ”
What the future holds for Williams is unclear. The story has gained steam over the past couple days and some veterans have called for his resignation. Journalists do sometimes get the facts wrong even as they make an honest effort to get them right. But for a journalist to intentionally lie about an incident that he witnessed in the field and in the process glorify his own involvement in that incident is a different matter altogether.