Appearing on the Fox News Channel (FNC) program Hannity on Thursday night, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell called on NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams to do “the honorable thing” and “resign” following the lie that he had told for years that his helicopter was hit by an RPG over Iraq in March 2003.
Bozell told host Sean Hannity that Williams’s claim about his false story being “a bungled attempt” to thank a veteran simply “just doesn’t pass the smell test” considering how: “If he bungled it, then he also bungled it on the Letterman show two years ago. How do you bungle it twice and how do you bungle being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade?”
Continuing on that line of thought, Bozell wondered: “How is that misremembered? How do you misremember hit by a rocket-propelled grenade? You either were or you weren't.”
Closing out his first point during the segment, Bozell stated that what Williams did “wasn’t bungled” or “misremembered” but a situation where “[h]e clearly lied.”
Speaking later regarding the track record of Williams and NBC News calling out everyone from Hillary Clinton to former baseball player Mark McGwire for lying over the past decade, Bozell observed that “they have a curious standard here” in that the network “will call out people, but now they need to be called out because they're involved with it.”
When Hannity asked Bozell and fellow guest Lt. Col. Bill Cowan (Ret.) what the fate of Williams should be, Bozell said that he should “resign” and brought up the “culture of dishonesty” at NBC and MSNBC:
Well, I think it's a bigger question than Brian Williams. I mean, there seems to be a culture of dishonesty at NBC and MSNBC. They're having to apologize once a week. You know, this comes on the heels of that Middle Eastern correspondent of NBC saying that Kyle – that Chris Kyle was a racist on a killing spree. That was just two weeks ago. So, it just seems like every week there's another scandal involving some major person at NBC. Should he be fired? I think the honorable thing is for him to resign.
Cowan agreed by saying “that’d be great if he would resign” considering what Williams did was “a diservice to all legitimate combat journalists out there, many of whom have died, four of whom beheaded within the last few months.”
