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Embattled news anchor Brian Williams couldn’t bring himself to admit he lied about coming under fire on a chopper in Iraq — so he instead wondered aloud if he had a brain tumor, a new report claims. Several NBC News insiders told Vanity Fair that the fact-challenged Williams — who was suspended without pay for six months from his “Nightly News” gig — had trouble explaining what had happened. “(He said,) ‘Did something happen to (my) head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head,’” a source told the magazine in its upcoming piece. “He just didn’t...

How in the world did NBC News let its biggest star and face of its division run around America for more than ten years telling stolen valor lies, lie-lies, whoppers, white lies, exaggerations, and — if you want to be charitable — embellishments. Brian Williams didn’t just spew bald-faced lies from David Letterman’s couch. He lied repeatedly on the air at NBC News and its affiliates. He lied to NBC News legend Tim Russert. Stories Williams’ shared with NBC’s own Tom Brokaw both on the air and at Columbia Journalism school are now disputed. Things told to other reporters don’t...

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/02/12/questions-emerge-over-statement-brian-williams-made-in-socal/

<p>There’s a story Brian Williams likes to tell. He has told it in a TV interview. He has told it to at least two book authors. But even though it had all the makings of a great yarn — danger, guns, resolve — Williams never reported it to his viewers.</p>

ies: Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson reminds us the secretary of state who blamed Benghazi on a video once made up a story about courage under fire in Bosnia. Maybe Brian Williams can be her 2016 running mate. 'Nothing in life," Winston Churchill once famously said, "is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result," except perhaps in the minds of network anchors like NBC's Brian Williams and political candidates such as Hillary Clinton, who also claimed a brush with death in a war zone on her resume. Perhaps they can swap war stories. Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson reminded...

The atmosphere surrounding Brian Williams has turned so toxic that it’s not clear when—or even if—he’ll be able to return to the anchor chair. The original plan—Williams apologizes, takes himself off the air for a few days, schmoozes with Letterman, and slides back into his job—has crumbled. The apology was weak and inaccurate, too fleeting to heal the wound over telling a lie about his chopper in Iraq having been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. His statement that he had decided as managing editor to suspend himself made it look like nobody at NBC is in charge, that he is...

BREAKING: Brian Williams’s Replacement Lester Holt Falsely Claims He Flew 9 Gs, “Had Bombs Fall Around Him” in NBC Post… Gotnews.com has confirmed that embattled NBC anchor Brian Williams’s replacement, Lester Holt, has also exaggerated his past exploits. In an October 2006 blog post for NBC News Holt described conquering his fear of snakes and how he wasn’t afraid of doing dangerous things. “I am not a whimp [sic]. I have done stories dangling 90 floors above Chicago in a window-washing rig on the Sears Tower. I have pulled 9-Gs and done loops and rolls with the Thunderbirds and Blue...

Here we go again… NBC anchor Brian Williams said he has close contacts in the Pentagon and they got him a piece of the fuselage of the chopper shot down in the Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. Williams says he has one piece and Barack Obama has the other. Via Sooper Mexican: “I have something that fits that perfectly. I have friends among the Special Operations folks in the Pentagon. And I have a piece of the fuselage of the chopper that didn’t make it in Abbottabad. It’s one of the toughest things to get. And the president has a...

What has happened at NBC News? Answer? Nothing that hasn’t been happening in slow motion for years. Back there in the mists of January -- last month -- I wrote a story in this space about a group called the Conservative War Chest launching a major effort to call attention to what the group called the“corruption of American journalism” - with a specific and detailed focus on NBC and its Comcast owners. Released weeks before these latest stories about anchor Williams hit the fan the 65-page report provided chapter and verse about the culture of NBC and its cable sibling...

Brian Williams' claims probed by NBC's investigative unit Published February 06, 2015 FoxNews.com NBC News has assigned the head of its own investigative unit to look into statements made by anchor Brian Williams about his reporting in Iraq a dozen years ago. A source at the network who requested anonymity because the person is not authorized to speak on personnel matters confirmed the investigation on Friday. Williams has apologized for falsely saying on the air that he was in a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade while in Iraq in 2003. Richard Esposito, a former editor at the New York...

THIS was a bomb that had been ticking for a while. NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography. 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. 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.

He lives in a vivid fantasy world that would make Walter Mitty blush — never missing a chance to shamelessly play the hero or embellish a news story. Reality-challenged NBC anchor Brian Williams once boasted about abandoning a dying buddy to cover the death of Princess Diana — but said it was worth it because it won him worldwide fame. “I lost a very good friend to Agent Orange-related cancer,” he told Alec Baldwin in a March 2013 interview on the “30 Rock” actor’s “Here’s the Thing” show on WNYC radio. “I was in the hospital room with him. It...

Brian Williams is stepping away from NBC Nightly News for several days. The anchor sent a note to the show's staff, announcing that Lester Holt is replacing him this week. The news comes as the anchor is embroiled in a scandal surrounding his story about being a passenger in a helicopter that took fire in the Iraq War. Williams' message can be seen, below. "In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions. "As Managing Editor...

FULL TITLE: Another Williams Chopper Tale! NBC Anchor Claims Hezbollah Rockets Buzzed His Helicopter During Israel War Completely separate from the 2003 Iraq helicopter incident Brian Williams confessed to lying about this week, thanks to a Twitter user who alerted Ace Of Spades, we now have a 2007 video of Williams claiming he was involved in a hairy wartime incident involving a different helicopter during a different war. According to the NBC Nightly News anchor, during “the war with Hezballah in Israel, a few years back … there were Katuyshka rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in.”

Via Ace and Twitter user Niedermeyer’s Dead Horse, yet another tale of Brian Williams’ heroism on that fateful day in Iraq in 2003 has emerged, this time from 2007. Don’t forget that the absolutely false version of his helicopter ride being hit by an RPG had been floating around since 2004, this time the story has even more compelling detail. Williams tells Fairfield University reporter Emily Fitzmaurice in November 2007 about all of the close calls he’s had as a reporter, including the 2003 incident in Iraq in which he looked down the tube of the RPG launcher. Pick up...

NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who apologized on the air Wednesday night for lying about an experience covering the Iraq War, is now facing scrutiny over his gripping accounts of Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that burnished his nightly news bona fides almost a decade ago. Williams’ account of seeing a body float by in the French Quarter — which remained largely dry — and even a claim of catching dysentery from drinking Katrina floodwaters have raised eyebrows among bloggers and elsewhere since he took it on the chin this week over a claim that he rode in a helicopter that...

The following memo was sent from NBC News President Deborah Turness to NBC news staff on Friday: All, This has been a difficult few days for all of us at NBC News. Yesterday, Brian and I spoke to the Nightly News team. And this morning at the Editorial Exchange, we both addressed the wider group. Brian apologized once again, and specifically expressed how sorry he is for the impact this has had on all of you and on this proud organization.

Long before he was caught lying about his chopper being forced down by enemy fire in Iraq, Brian Williams boasted how he bravely rescued a terrified puppy from a house fire. Or maybe it was two puppies. The truth-challenged NBC anchor told dueling versions of his supposed heroics as a teenage volunteer firefighter with the Old Village Fire Company in Middletown, NJ. In October 2011, Williams waxed rhapsodic about how his dad took him to fires. “I remember one such house fire . . . conducting a search on my hands and knees, when I felt something warm, squishy and furry on...

Next to the Iranian nuclear program or Putin's neo-Soviet expansionism, the question of whether NBC News "managing editor" Brian Williams is a self-aggrandizing liar or a mentally ill fantasist is a relatively minor matter, notwithstanding that he is the very embodiment of the strange antiquated assumptions of network news - that because a chap looks like a 1950s department-store mannequin he's your go-to guy for economic analysis and foreign policy. As to the subject at issue, my general view of "personal stories" (including my own) was summed up by Mel Brooks on stage a few decades back reminiscing about his...

NEW YORK (AP) — NBC News has assigned the head of its own investigative unit to look into statements that anchor Brian Williams made about his reporting in Iraq a dozen years ago, an episode that's ballooned into a full-blown credibility crisis for the network. NBC News President Deborah Turness announced the probe in an internal memo on Friday. Williams has apologized for falsely saying on the air that he was in a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade while in Iraq in 2003, and Turness said Friday the anchor expressed his regrets to his colleagues for the impact the...