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Is NBC still having to check departed anchor Brian Williams’ assertions? It sounds that way — and it sounds like in this instance where there is smoke there is a self-serving exaggerated story:
The network’s internal fact-checking investigation is “nowhere near done,” a senior NBC source said Thursday.
It has widened beyond just Williams’ initial errors about a 2003 Iraq War mission to include other possible misstatements, but the network has not commented on any particular ones.
When he apologized last week for his on-air error about the Iraq mission, he chalked it up to innocent “misremembering.” But others have implied something more malicious.
On Thursday The Huffington Post identified questions about Williams’ claims of flying into Baghdad with SEAL Team 6 and about “war memorabilia the anchor claims to have received as gifts, including a Navy SEAL’s knife and a piece of the helicopter from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.”
CNN analyst Peter Bergen said on “Anderson Cooper 360” that he was told by sources in the Seal community that it would be impossible for Williams to have ever traveled with Seal Team 6.
“We do not embed journalists with any elements of that unit … bottom line — no,” one Special Operations Command official said.
In the case of the memorabilia that Williams says he received from “his friends” in the Seal community: “that doesn’t pass any sniff test,” another Seal officer told Bergen.A spokeswoman for NBC News declined to comment.
Williams’ exaggerations about Iraq and subsequent questions about his accounts of Hurricane Katrina have triggered a full-blown crisis of confidence inside NBC News. (The scrutiny about Katrina is particularly significant.) Williams was suspended on Tuesday for six months without pay, and may never return to his “NBC Nightly News” anchor chair.
The suspension had an ominous feel to it — a sense, expressed by many media analysts, that there are more examples out there of the anchor embellishing the truth.
Did he really interview John Wilkes Booth shortly after Booth killed Lincoln and rode off on a horse?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.