Brian Williams said in an interview that aired on Friday that he did not realize he was saying something untrue when he told a story earlier this year about an Iraq combat experience.
The former anchor of NBC Nightly News, whose reassignment inside the network was announced on Thursday following an almost five-month suspension, described his state of mind in an interview with NBC colleague Matt Lauer.
Lauer pressed Williams over whether he realized he was lying when he said, on a January Nightly News broadcast, that a helicopter he was riding in in 2003 had been “forced down after being hit by an RPG”.
“No,” Williams said. “It came from a bad place. It came from a sloppy choice of words. I told stories that were not true over the years. Looking back, it is very clear I never intended to. It got mixed up, it got turned around in my mind.”
When he returns to the air, Williams will be the “anchor of breaking news and special reports” at MSNBC, NBC’s cable channel, the network said.
Williams’s description of his mental mix-up followed a long silence he broke on Thursday by apologizing in a statement. The discovery that Williams had made up his Iraq story and parts of other stories led NBC to suspend him in February and open an internal investigation.
The professional plunge was a dramatic development in the career of Williams, who had been one of the most trusted people in the country and anchor of the top-rated nightly newscast on television, attracting some 10 million viewers nightly.
Looking contrite in his interview with Lauer, Williams variously assigned his mistakes to sloppiness, a “double standard,” egotism and “a whole host of other sins”.
But at points in the interview, Williams made statements that seemed to downplay his transgressions. In addition to characterizing the sentence “the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG” as “a sloppy choice of words”, Williams characterized his tall tales as having been restricted to after-hours appearances on talkshows or before students.
“In our work, I have always treated words very carefully,” Williams said. “But Matt, it is clear that after work, when I got out of that building, when I got out of that realm, I used a double standard. Something changed, and I was sloppier, and I said things that weren’t true.”
In fact it is statements that Williams made on NBC’s air, either from the anchor chair, as in the Iraq incident, or as a reporter in the field, as with during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that have been challenged as untrue.
At another point in the interview with Lauer, Williams described his botched on-air apology before he was suspended as typical of general human frailty.
“I told the story correctly for years before I told it incorrectly,” Williams said of the Iraq report. “I was not trying to mislead people. That to me is a huge difference here. After that incident I tried and failed, as others have tried and failed – and why is it, when we’re trying to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ that we can’t come out and say, ‘I’m sorry’?”
Williams said he took responsibility for his untruths. “These statements I made – I own this,” he said. “I own up to this. I had to go through and see, and try to figure out how it happened. It has been a time of realization.”
Williams said he expected “to be held to a different standard”.
“Going forward, there are going to be different rules of the road,” he said. “I know why people feel the way they do. I get this. I’m responsible for this. I am sorry for what happened here. I am different as a result.”
