Others NBC News employees may be culpable for Brian Williams' lie about being aboard a chopper forced down by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, says Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business and Culture for the Media Research Council.
Gainor told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV on Monday that the Iraq incident and other stories involving Williams that have come into question must have been witnessed by his news crew.
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"It's not just Williams. In each one of these events, he had producers, cameramen and personnel around him who either own up and admit he's not telling the truth or who are covering for him. One of the two," he said.
NBC is now conducting an investigation of Williams' news reporting. There are also questions arising from the veteran newsman's claim that he saw a body floating in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
"It's so bad now, [that] people are doubting even his teenage recollections of being mugged when he was selling Christmas trees," Gainor said.
"Every story with him has this air of romance and adventure. It's like it's a Hollywood movie only because it comes across a Hollywood movie and is just as believable."
Reports have emerged that NBC was well aware of Williams' habit of inflating tales of his newsman "heroism." Maureen Dowd,
writing in The New York Times, reports, "NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography."
She noted that after Williams regaled "David Letterman with his faux heroics," stating that, "two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47," veterans of the mission revealed it was a helicopter in front of the one carrying Williams that was hit and forced down.
Williams is also under scrutiny for his recollections of riding in an Israeli military helicopter in 2006, when Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah allegedly passed under his chopper.
Last Wednesday, Williams, one of NBC's biggest stars, recanted his longtime claim of being aboard the chopper that was hit during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Williams, who apologized on his nightly newscast, told Stars and Stripes: "I don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another."
He has now taken himself off the air pending the results of the NBC probe.
"He should honorably resign," Gainor said. "Remember he works for the very same media that destroyed [former Vice President] Dan Quayle for misspelling the word 'potato'. They destroyed him for a typo."
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