Embattled NBC News Anchor Brian Williams Taking Leave of Absence Amid Iraq Faux Helicopter Story … Is This the Beginning of the End?

 THE END MAY BE NEAR … NBC NEWS ANCHOR BRIAN WILLIAMS STEPPING ASIDE TEMPORARILY FROM NBC NIGHTLY NEWS …

Lying Brian Williams is said to be stepping aside from his anchor position at NBC’s Nightly News, but is this really just the beginning of the end? Williams’ fabricated and continually embellished Iraq helicopter story has gotten him in a world of trouble. even though he had been told to stop telling the faux news account by people who knew the story was made up and false, he did not. Williams wrote a memo to the NBC News staff, “As managing editor of NBC Nightly News, I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days, and Lester Holt has kindly agreed to sit in for me to allow us to adequately deal with this issue.  Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.”

UPON YOUR RETURN? Don’t count on it. It is beginning to sound like all Brian Williams does is make stuff up to a made for TV movie, rather than the truth of what actually happened. Helicopter hard landings in Iraq, taking enemy fire,  looking down the very tube of an RPG and even seeing floating bodies post Katrina, Williams may want to write Hollywood movie scripts, rather than report the news, because it would appear he had an issue reporting facts.

Brian Williams said Saturday that he will step aside as anchor of his nightly NBC News broadcast for “several days” as a result of the controversy generated by his comments about his reporting during the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina.

With his troubles mounting by the day, Williams said he had decided to take himself off his signature newscast, “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” while NBC looks into statements he has made about his work in interviews stretching back more than a decade.

“As managing editor of NBC Nightly News, I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days, and Lester Holt has kindly agreed to sit in for me to allow us to adequately deal with this issue,” Williams wrote in a memo to the NBC News staff that was made public by the network. “Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.”

Williams, 55, has been under fire since Wednesday after he apologized to a group of Iraq war veterans for apparently exaggerating the danger he and an NBC News crew faced while covering the start of the war in 2003. Williams had described coming under rocket and gunfire while traveling with U.S. soldiers in a military helicopter that was damaged and forced to land. The soldiers disputed Williams’s account, saying his aircraft had not been fired upon, prompting Williams to recant the story.

From Ace of Spades comes the below VIDEO, Midnight Brian Williams Update: Williams Claimed to Have Looked Down the Very Tube of the RPG That Shot Down the Lead Copter in 2007. Williams may want to remember stories of credibility, not ones that make him sound like he is some brave soul that has escaped death. In the video below he goes on to spew more BS about all these people who died in the Super Dome following Hurricane Katrina. Hmm, I guess we can’t interview those folks to see if Williams is telling the truth, they are dead. Or so he says. Williams says, “We don’t have problems going to dangerous places, a lot of us consider that our jobs.” There lies the lie.

“It gets me to thinking, I’ve been very lucky the way my life has turned out, I’ve been very lucky to have survived a few things that I’ve been involved in, at a perception a few minutes ago, I was remembering something I tend to forget, the war with Hezballah in Israel, a few years back, where there were Katuyshka rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in. A few years before that, you go back to Iraq, and I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us and it hit the chopper in front of ours.”

Best article name, from the NY Times, ‘Anchors Aweigh’.

UPDATE I: Good grief, now there are questions whether Brian Williams reported stories following Hurricane Katrina truthfully. On Friday, NBC network officials said an internal review had been launched to vet Williams’s statements.  His comments about his work covering Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are also part of the review. It would appear Brian Williams was full of crap in his reporting on Katrina as well.

NBC News launched an internal investigation Friday into statements made by its lead anchor, Brian Williams, about his reporting from Iraq in 2003, as well as stories he told about his award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The investigation, confirmed by NBC officials, represents a change in the network’s attitude toward its popular anchor only a day after senior managers appeared to have accepted his apology for misstating the facts surrounding his excursion on a military helicopter while reporting on the start of the Iraq war nearly 12 years ago.

Williams and NBC won a Peabody Award for reporting on Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and its surroundings. Williams had recently ascended to anchor, and he flew to report live on the Category 5 storm a few days before it struck Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005. Williams reported daily from the city’s French Quarter and its convention center and Superdome, where residents sought shelter.