The Washington Post reported on the front page Thursday that senior NBC officials "seriously considered firing" Brian Williams, and the anchor "failed to secure a promise he can return" later this year. They considered three options: Firing, a lesser suspension, or the suspension without promise of return -- what Williams received.
But the juiciest part of the story by Manuel Roig-Franzia, Scott Higham, and Paul Farhi came at the end.
They also said they were not surprised by the allegations that Williams had inflated his involvement in news stories and what he supposedly witnessed while on assignment. They said his exaggerations were an open secret at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and became an inside joke, mostly because they were not made on “Nightly News.”
“We lost people in Iraq; to us it’s not a joke,” a longtime NBC producer said. “It’s not something you glorify or pound your chest about. You don’t need to inflate these things. There’s just an overwhelming sense of loss.”
There is also a sense that the newsroom has been adrift since Comcast Cable took over NBC Universal in 2011. NBC journalists said editors who once kept a close watch over the broadcast have departed, leaving Williams to operate with few meaningful checks and balances.
As managing editor of “NBC Nightly News,” Williams held enormous sway over story selection and over which reporters would appear on his broadcasts. Journalists with serious reputations were forced out or left on their own after the Comcast takeover. The newsroom hasn’t been the same since, several NBC reporters and producers said. [See Lisa Myers and Michael Isikoff.]
“There are few people who talk to Brian in an authoritative way,” a former top NBC news manager said. “There really wasn’t anyone over him to say anything to him or to question his facts. There was no one managing him. There was constant changing to his whims.
“No one said, ‘No.’”
NBC was well aware of Williams exaggerating his exploits, so when he took it on the air, NBC officials were suspicious of the on-air apology, particularly the anchor’s statement that he had “made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” a network source said. “Ninety percent of the people knew it was not misremembering, it was making it up,” the source said.
Internally, Williams, 55, was fighting hard to preserve his reputation and his job. He was calling people at all hours, looking for some kind of an escape route, according to a top network official. “They were clinging to the, ‘Gee I just conflated my facts here’ story,” the network official said.
But his task was made harder because serious questions were being raised about stories he’d repeated for years about his coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — a career-defining, award-winning assignment for an anchor with a relatively thin reporting résumé who was eager to cement his journalistic bona fides....
But inside NBC, the Iraq fabrication was seen as the most damaging. “When helicopter crew members get shot down and you attach yourself to what they went through, it’s pretty outrageous,” a person familiar with internal discussions said.
They knew they had a problem, but it hadn't surfaced on air -- until he "reported" his RPG story on air as he related his Rangers-hockey-game salute:
The suspension was the culmination of a long period of internal concerns. NBC officials had been warned for some time about Williams’s exaggerations and self-aggrandizement, the network official said.
People were sending up red flags about a year ago, the official said.
What started out as eye-rolling escalated into genuine concern, but no one took action earlier because the statements that drew attention of staffers were not aired on the news broadcast.
That changed with the hockey-game report. Once Williams used the broadcast to claim his helicopter had been shot down, he crossed a line that led to Tuesday’s decision.
