Brian Williams is stepping aside from his NBC News anchor desk for what is being described as “several days.”
Williams, who some on social media have dubbed “lyin’ Brian” for his “chopper whopper,” is engulfed in a huge scandal about fabricating a war story to apparently burnish his image as some kind of macho foreign correspondent.
As The Inquisitr previously reported , Williams is now the target of an internal NBC investigation after admitted to fabricating the story about being forced down during his reporting of the Iraq invasion, when he claimed, on multiple occasions, that the helicopter he was riding on came under enemy rocket propelled grenade (RPG) fire. Several military vets who were there blew the whistle on Williams’ misleading account primarily through the reporting of Stars & Stripes .
The anchor’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is also now coming into question, specifically that he saw a body float by his five-star hotel room in the French Quarter or that he suffered dysentery after accidentally ingesting floodwaters.
In a message to NBC Nightly News staff today, Brian Williams conveyed the following sentiments about his temporary leave of absence from the anchor chair according to The Hollywood Reporter .
“In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions. As managing editor of NBC Nightly News , 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.”
In covering the ongoing Brian Williams scandal, many media outlets are revisiting a bogus claim by Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential campaign that she and her entourage came under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996.
“From what I can tell from the transcripts at the time, Williams did not directly address Clinton’s exaggerations on the air when they were covered by NBC Nightly News . But his colleagues at NBC and MSNBC hammered away at Clinton repeatedly over several weeks for her dishonesty and carelessness,” Slate columnist Alec MacGillis observed .
Under the circumstances, do you think Brian Williams’ hiatus from anchoring NBC Nightly News will really only be temporary?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0nr7JMWQnY