Brian Williams is removing himself from the NBC Nightly News, at least temporarily. This as a result of flak he’s taking for misremembering (to his friends) or lying (to his critics) about a helicopter ride he took in Iraq in 2003.
I’m no big fan of Williams (the last anchor I really liked was Peter Jennings of ABC), but heaven knows I’ve embellished stories of things that happened to me in the past. It’s not clear to me that he deliberately fudged the story in an attempt to enhance his resumé (I’d think it hardly needs it) or he just got some facts wrong 12 years after the event in question. The helicopter he was on did apparently get hit by small-arms fire, or so the pilot says, although now he’s saying he doesn’t trust his own memory of events that day.
It seems to me that now soldiers are stepping in to say Williams is a bum who didn’t do any of the things he said he did. That’s starting to get into Swift Boat Veterans for Truth territory, and we know how much “truth” was behind that group’s statements about Senator Kerry in 2004.
I don’t think Williams is guilty of much here. We’ll see.
Any time the right can take down a non-Fox reporter, they’re gleeful, despite the very overt whoppers theirs tell daily.
But I tend to agree,on the 4 major networks, Jennings was the last I liked too. MSNBC, though, does have a coupla good ones, but they’re not on at my dinner hour so I rarely see ’em.