For years, Brian Williams had been telling a story that wasn’t true. Wednesday night, he took to his anchor chair on NBC Nightly News to apologize for misleading the public.
On Thursday, his real problems started.
A host of military veterans and commentators came forward on television and social media, challenging Mr. Williams’s assertion that he had made an innocent mistake when he spoke, on several occasions, about having been in a United States military helicopter that was 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.
The host of “Fox & Friends,” Steve Doocy, called the episode “embarrassing.” On CNN’s “News Day,” Christopher Cuomo said that blaming the lie on “the fog of war” wasn’t acceptable and that the Internet would “eat him alive.” USA Today's media columnist, Rem Rieder, wrote: “It’s hard to see how Williams gets past this, and how he survives as the face of NBC News.”
It was unclear whether Mr. Williams would feel compelled to speak on the issue again, or if NBC would decide it needed to address the controversy. What is clear is that the credibility of one of America’s best-known and most trusted TV journalists has been seriously damaged. And that the moral authority of the nightly network news anchor, already diminished in the modern media era, has just been dealt another blow.
It’s not unprecedented for a public figure to exaggerate his or her experiences, especially when it comes to military conflict. In 2008, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, running for president, acknowledged that she had misspoken when she described having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996. While running for Senate in 2010, Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam.
But for a journalist — and in particular, an anchor — to do so has struck many people in the news industry as a different sort of offense. While most were unwilling to publicly criticize a colleague, few were persuaded by Mr. Williams’s explanation.
“My inbox is filled today with producers who went to Iraq with me, to Afghanistan with me, to Haiti with me, all kind of wondering how you could mess this up,” said Aaron Brown, a former anchor for CNN. “I have no answer for that. I will tell you that getting shot at is not something you forget.”
Mr. Williams just extended his contract with NBC in December, with terms reported to be as much as $10 million a year for as long as five years. At the time, Deborah M. Turness, the head of NBC News, called him one of “the most trusted journalists of our time.”
He has been anchor and managing editor of NBC’s nightly news show since 2004. Mr. Williams’s broadcast has long been considered a block of stability for the network. On Tuesday, NBC Nightly News issued a news release announcing that it was the top evening newscast in total viewers and the 25- to 54-year-old demographic for January for the second consecutive month.
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