More trouble for the embattled, soon-to-be-totally-former face of NBC News. Brian Williams survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Chosin Reservoir, but he may finally have met his Waterloo:
An NBC News internal investigation into Brian Williams has examined a half-dozen instances in which he is thought to have fabricated, misrepresented or embellished his accounts, two people with inside knowledge of the investigation said. The investigation includes at least one episode that was previously unreported, these people said, involving statements by Mr. Williams about events from Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring.
The investigation, conducted by at least five NBC journalists, was commissioned early this year after Mr. Williams was forced to apologize for embellishing an account of a helicopter episode in Iraq in 2003. He was subsequently suspended for six months from his anchor position on the “NBC Nightly News.” The inquiry is being led by Richard Esposito, the senior executive producer for investigations, for the news division.
The review of Mr. Williams’s reporting is not finished and no final conclusions have been reached. When completed, it is expected to form the basis for a decision on whether to bring him back. It is not clear when that decision will be made.
No one on the Right should get smirky about this. Williams did what his employers paid him to do: be a handsome talking head. It was when he went off-message, and exposed the lie that anchor men are supposed to be Men of Action, that he broke his compact with the suits and the viewers, and stood exposed claiming to be what he was not.
Mr. Williams fell from beloved news anchor to a cautionary tale in a matter of days in February, after the military newspaper Stars and Stripes raised questions about his account of an incident in the early days of the most recent Iraq war. He had been on a helicopter, he said on his own show and on “Late Show With David Letterman,” which had been shot down by rocket-propelled grenade fire. The soldiers aboard the helicopter disagreed. In the subsequent days and weeks, additional accusations emerged that he had embellished his reports.
Network news is dying anyway, but as it fades, how would it hurt to have a real reporter with news judgment as “managing editor” of a 20-minute newscast five nights a week? How hard could that possibly be?
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