“But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and ‘there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,’ as one NBC News reporter put it,” Ms. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division.” “NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography.
“THIS was a bomb that had been ticking for a while,” columnist Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times Sunday Review. Esposito’s digging may have to go deeper and wider than the known flap over the Iraq helicopter episode and Katrina. “But he is a well-respected reporter: he has a reputation as a ‘digger,’ someone who aggressively pursues subjects and scoops, not the sort of person who'd help make unpleasant news go away.” “In television news industry circles, there are many raised eyebrows about Esposito's assignment,” Brian Stelter writes at CNN Money. It’s being led by Richard Esposito, the senior executive producer of NBC's investigative unit.Ĭan NBC credibly investigate itself? It’s a question many other top news organizations from the New York Times to Rolling Stone have had to face in recent years. The network, meanwhile, has begun an internal investigation of Williams’ reporting and assertions. Now, some of Williams’ other claims are being probed as well, going back to when he was a teenage volunteer firefighter, since then telling of the time when he rescued a puppy (or puppies) in a house fire. What China is – and isn’t – learning from military drills near Taiwan Since that admission this past week, his recounting of events covering Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – seeing a body floating in the street from his hotel window in the New Orleans French Quarter – has been called into question as well. The question now is, will Williams ever be back in his capacity as the major voice and face of network news broadcasting? Speculation has begun about who might permanently replace Williams if it comes to that.įor now, his anchor spot will be filled by Lester Holt, who currently anchors ‘NBC Nightly News” on weekends and has filled in for Williams.Īs is now well-known, Williams was not – as he claimed numerous times over the years – riding in a helicopter that came under enemy fire in Iraq in 2003. Williams said in a memo to colleagues Saturday. "Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us," Mr. Under fire for embellishing his reporting, NBC news anchor Brian Williams has taken himself off the air “for the next several days.”
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