Even MORE Troubles for NBC’s Brian Williams

NBC's Brian Williams

By now virtually everyone’s heard of NBC’s Brian Williams claims of being in a helicopter hit by enemy fire and forced to make “a quick, hard landing” in Iraq, being eviscerated by witnesses, including the helicopter pilot of THAT flight, but as usual, such mistakes always seem to grow bigger and become worse...and WORSE!

This one seems to be no exception.

Now, folks are vetting some of Brian Williams’ Katrina claims, including the one about his seeing bodies floating by his hotel window when he was covering the event.

The New Orleans Advocate has challenged this piece of reporting by Brian Williams on Katrina:

“When you look out of your hotel 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.”

The Advocate alleges that Williams, who covered the aftermath of the devastating hurricane from the city’s French Quarter, could not have seen a body float by, as that section was never flooded.

A former city health director who was in the French Quarter after the storm said that Williams’ account was not possible, “We were never wet. It was never wet,” Dr. Brobson Lutz told the Advocate.

Compounding matters even further, Brian Williams also claimed that while he slept at the Superdome during the storm, that he swallowed flood waters and suffered from severe dysentery. He also claimed to be curled up in the fetal position because of the illness which causes acute bloody diarrhea. The same Dr. Lutz did not recall any reported cases of dysentery after Katrina. “I saw a lot of people with cuts and bruises and such, but I don’t recall a single, solitary case of gastroenteritis during Katrina or in the whole month afterward.”

The additional “inaccuracies” seem to indicate a pattern here, making Williams’ penchant for embellishment and personal aggrandizement more a character trait than mere “memory lapses.”

Williams’ embellishments have fueled a LOT of online bits, from, “Dan Rather just found the photos of Brian Williams’ downed Chinook,” to, photoshopped pictures showing him reporting from the moon and riding shotgun with O.J. Simpson in his Ford Bronco.

This is going to be a very hard ordeal for Williams to live down and if even more “false memories” come out, he’s probably done. Personally, I’m betting on done.