Friday, February 13, 2015

The Doctor Who Of Journalism: Brian Williams May Have Lied About Meeting The Pope, Watching Berlin Wall Come Down


Tina Nguyen at mediaite.com offers a piece on even more wild stories that came out of NBC anchorman Brian Williams.

Today, two more Brian Williams stories are being picked apart, and while neither of them have to do with the Iraq War, they do raise further questions about how far the NBC anchor is willing to stretch the truth: A CNN Money report indicates that Williams exaggerated a story about meeting Pope John Paul II as a college student in 1979, and, more flagrantly, being at the Berlin Wall when it fell.

The first incident, which Williams recounted as early as 2002, involved him attending the Pope’s visit to Catholic University when he was a student in 1979, though Williams initially said that he had just attended. Starting in 2004, he added the detail that he shook the Pope’s hand, which is also plausible. But shortly after the Pope’s death in 2005, the story took on some wild turns:

...It is quite possible that Brian Williams is the Doctor Who of journalism: he travels through time and space in his TARDIS to visit historical events, then comes back to the present with tales about how he was at the Berlin Wall, or on the Titanic, or making out with Madame de Pompadour at Versailles. Or he could just be making stuff up all the time to look cool.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/brian-williams-may-have-fibbed-about-meeting-the-pope-watching-berlin-wall-come-down/

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