NBC internal probe inquires anchor’s Iraq, Katrina reports
NEW YORK – 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 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 episode has had.
“As you would expect, we have a team dedicated to gathering the facts to help us make sense of all that has transpired,” Turness wrote. “We’re working on what the best next steps are.”
Richard Esposito, who has worked at the New York Daily News, New York Newsday and ABC and is now at NBC, is leading the investigation.
Williams anchored “Nightly News” from New York on Friday, making no mention of the criticisms of his work.
Questions were also raised about statements Williams made on coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which was one of his proudest moments at NBC. In a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Williams twice referenced seeing a body float down a street in New Orleans.
“When you look out of your hotel room window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams said.
Several minutes later, Williams again talked about seeing the body as he discussed how it felt to cover the storm.
The remarks drew suspicion because during Katrina, there was relatively little flooding in New Orleans’ French Quarter.
Williams was staying at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in New Orleans, according to an NBC source.
Capt. James Scott, who was a police commander in the downtown area at the time of Katrina, said he saw a body floating along Rampart Street on the edge of the French Quarter.
The body Scott saw was about four blocks from the Ritz-Carlton, which was surrounded by up to three feet of water, he said.
Williams is the leading man at the network’s news division, whose nightly newscast has topped its rivals in ratings for the better part of a decade. As a frequent talk show guest and one-time “Saturday Night Live” host, his celebrity transcended the news division.
NBC News needs to look at not only Williams’ story about the helicopter, which has changed in details as he’s talked about it over the years, but whether anybody else at the network knew that he was spreading a falsehood and did anything about it, said Kelly McBride, an expert on ethics for the journalism think tank the Poynter Institute.
“He is the front man of ‘Nightly News’ and is seen as the primary arbiter of the facts,” McBride said. “For him to get something wrong on something he was involved in casts doubt on his ability to get any facts right.”