NBC gets exclusive on its own anchor
NBC, which suspended news anchor Brian Williams in February for exaggerating or saying things that weren’t true about what he experienced in reporting the news, reported an “exclusive” last Friday with Williams about the “torture” in which he has gone through the last several months.
Williams, who will return in August as an anchor of breaking news and special reports for the low-rated MSNBC cable news network, told “Today” anchor Matt Lauer in the “exclusive” that the untruths “came from clearly a bad place, a bad urge inside of me. This was clearly ego driven, the desire to better my role in a story I was already in.”
Lauer pressed him on whether he “lied,” but the former respected newsman wouldn’t take the bait. However, an NBC internal investigation indicated Williams “made a number of inaccurate statements” about his experiences, including about being attacked in a helicopter while in Iraq.
In the drawn-out interview about his misdeeds that occurred on the very network on which he was speaking, he also seemed to be wanting a little credit when he said he told the helicopter story correctly for years before he told it incorrectly.