Brian Williams had been telling a story that wasn't
true, and the episode evolved over the years, with his personal involvement gradually growing more perilous. In a 2003 was described as "
a close call in the skies over Iraq," Mr. Williams said, "the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky."
In 2013, He told David Letterman that he
had actually been on the helicopter that got shot down, adding that a crew member had been injured and received a medal. "
We figured out how to land safely,
we landed very quickly and hard. We were stuck, four birds in the desert and we were north out ahead of the other Americans."
On the "Nightly News" recently, he described "a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an R.P.G.,"
The current controversy erupted after he spoke about it on air during a tribute to a retired soldier. Some veterans took to Facebook to complain.
A host of military veterans and pundits came forward on television and social media, challenging Mr. Williams's assertion that he had simply made a mistake when he spoke, on several occasions, about having been in a United States military helicopter forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003.
In fact, some of the soldiers present in Iraq that
day had been quietly fuming about Mr. Williams's reporting for years,
and had even tried to alert the news media to it earlier. Joe Summerlin,
who was on the helicopter that was forced down, said in an interview
that he and some of his fellow crew watched Mr. Williams's initial story
and were angered by his characterization of the events.
Mr. Williams apologized and said that he
had been on a different helicopter, behind the one that had sustained fire, and that
he had inadvertently "conflated" the two.
On CNN's "New Day,"
Chris Cuomo said that attributing the lie to "the fog of war" wasn't acceptable and
the Internet would "eat him alive." Rem Rieder, a USA Today media columnist, wrote, "It's hard to see how Williams gets past this, and how he survives as the face of NBC News."
Those who faked the story and created the Fiction must be immediately removed. Just a thought