ABC News Liars: 3 Events Brian Williams Suspected Lying About
Source: businessinsider.com
Brian Williams has quickly plummeted to a low point in his career.Williams, who anchored "NBC Nightly News" until he received a six-month suspension last week, went from being the 23rd-most-trusted person in America a little over a week ago to falling to the 835th spot.
Some NBC insiders have speculated that Williams will not be able to come back from the scandal that has engulfed him since he admitted to embellishing a story from his coverage of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Williams recounted the story several times over the past 12 years, exaggerating his role in the incident over time. Most recently, he said he was traveling in a helicopter that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, but after a veteran involved in the event questioned his story, Williams admitted he was actually riding in another helicopter that was about 30 minutes behind the one that was hit.
NBC launched an internal investigation, and since then other possible exaggerations have surfaced. Here are three other stories in which Williams is suspected of stretching the truth:
Flying into Iraq with SEAL Team Six
Williams has said on television multiple times that he flew into Baghdad with the Navy's SEAL Team Six, which was responsible for carrying out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, about three days after the US invaded Iraq, according to The Huffington Post. He has also said he received a SEAL's knife and a piece of the helicopter from the bin Laden raid as gifts.
As far as The Huffington Post could tell, Williams started telling these stories only in 2011, the year bin Laden was killed. Williams reported from the Baghdad airport on April 9, 2003, more than three days after the invasion of Iraq, but he didn't mention going anywhere with SEAL Team Six, possibly because he was told not to discuss their activities.
Sources who talked to The Huffington Post said these stories seemed implausible, with US Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw saying the organization did not "embed journalists with this or any other unit that conducts counter-terrorism missions."
NBC has not confirmed whether Williams' stories about SEAL Team Six are accurate.
Being in Berlin the day the wall fell
Williams said in 2008 that he "was at the Brandenburg Gate the night the wall came down," but that is most likely an exaggeration, as CNN reports.
Although Williams was in Berlin in 1989 to report on the fall of the Berlin Wall for WCBS-TV in New York, Tom Brokaw was the only American anchorman to report live from the scene the night the wall actually fell on November 9, CNN notes.
Williams has said publicly that he didn't arrive at the wall until 12 hours after Brokaw, but it seems as if in some retellings of the story he has misspoken about when he actually arrived on the scene.
Meeting the pope
Williams says he met St. John Paul II when the pope spoke at Catholic University's Washington, D.C., campus in 1979, according to CNN. While delivering the commencement address at Catholic University in 2004, Williams recalled the moment he "shook hands with the holy father" during the pope's visit to campus.
Soon after John Paul died in 2005, however, Williams provided a more elaborate account of this meeting while on air:
"I was a student at Catholic University, and over the course of two hours, chatted up a Secret Service agent who told me that the pope would be coming our way ... I positioned myself and held out my hand and said, 'Welcome to Catholic University, holy father.' And he embraced my hand with both of his, made the sign of the cross, and said a blessing to me."
When recounting the incident to Esquire later that same year, Williams never mentioned the presence of a Secret Service agent.
From: businessinsider.com
Trust and truth! Haha, yeah!
Brian Williams War Story 'Strangely' Similar to Hillary Clinton on Bosnia
newsbusters.org
Sharyl Attkisson knows a thing or two about media bias. After all, it was Attkisson who blew the lid off CBS's blatant bias favoring the president and his administration in her recent book Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington.
On Monday, Attkisson appeared on The Steve Malzberg Show on Newsmax TV, and told him she couldn’t understand how Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state and presidential candidate, could withstand such a scandal, while NBC News anchor Brian Williams may not. Attkisson was a reporter acommpanying Hillary Clinton in Bosnia, and realized Hillary’s lie after NewsBusters unearthed the video.
"To me, part of the irony is if Brian Williams isn't able to survive it — that we think it's important enough when somebody gives this kind of story that he would lose his career — yet we didn't care enough to have it matter that much with someone who became our secretary of state…[A person] we relied on for honest answers and truths in the aftermath of Benghazi and so on."
It was only one week ago that Williams, anchor of NBC Nightly News for nearly 10 years, issued a mea culpa during his news broadcast. Attkisson asked Malzberg "Is it really more important that Brian Williams has a certain type of character and honesty than a presidential candidate or secretary of state?"
"I don't know, that's up to the American people to decide, but clearly they got past it in the case of Hillary Clinton, although it was never explained. We'll see if people can get past it in the case of Brian Williams."
Attkisson said Williams' lie was "strangely" reminiscent to the one told by Clinton. "In both cases, the attempt at a mea culpa initially kind of almost made things worse," she said.
ATTKISSON: With Hillary Clinton, after the video was found that there was no sniper fire, there was no apparent danger on the runway as she claims, she doubled down and said, 'Well, I stopped and you saw pictures of me greeting the young girl, because how could I walk past her and break her little heart? But after that I ran to the car.
So I was assigned to do a second day story by [the CBS] Evening News … that showed more video that too wasn't true, and when she knew we had the video it is just beyond me that she continued to tell this tale.
The video, Attkisson said, showed that Clinton "lingered on the runway, took pictures with a group of seventh graders, visited with the troops, [and] took photographs with them and no apparent danger to her or anyone in the vicinity. "You kind of wonder in both instances … how they got away for so long with telling the story and how they thought that they would get away with it without somebody coming to them, family members and so on, saying that didn't happen."
From: businessinsider.com
