Brian Williams just won’t give up the ship.
He just can’t seem to bring himself to fully admit he lied about being in a chopper that came under fire and was shot down when he was embedded in Iraq.
Instead, he is wondering (aloud) if he might have had a brain tumor that made him get confused or forget the fact that he wasn’t shot down in an aircraft in a war zone.
I’m serious. You can’t make something this ridiculous up.
Even when he did (kinda) come clean before, saying, “I would not have chosen to make this mistake. I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another,” he seemed to be alluding to the fact that it was someone (or something) else’s fault.
In a recent Vanity Fair article, an unnamed source inside the news organization said, “[Williams said], ‘Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head?'” The source said, “We got the best [apology] we could get.”
From where I sit, this isn’t an apology at all. It’s a really terrible excuse that diminishes those who have been afflicted with brain tumors, turning them into some strange breed of fabricators and inventors of stories, on top of the fact that Williams still refuses to take full responsibility for the lies he told.
The Vanity Fair article chronicles how difficult it was to get Williams into the war zone to begin with, and then tells about how he seemed “shell-shocked” when he returned.
Another source told the magazine, in regard to getting him to apologize, “He was having a tough enough time coming to grips with the idea that he had gotten it wrong in the first place, slash misrepresented it, slash lied. He wasn’t anywhere in the ballpark of being helpful about what happened 12 years ago.”
This is just a veiled attempt to minimize the fact that what he did was a gross violation of the public’s trust. I appreciate this source trying to lessen the blow of what they feel Williams was going through or provide a rational reason for what Williams did, but at the end of the day, he made up stories, created facts out of thin air and ultimately violated the trust journalists have been working very hard to earn. And the fact that he refused to come out and own up to what he did is, to me, further proof that Brian Williams should never be trusted to report the news to the American public ever again.
And for him to use the seriously lame excuse of a tumor in his brain is unforgivable.
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