San Francisco, Feb 11 (IANS/EFE) 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.
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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.
--IANS/EFE
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