Another prominent journalist caught in a lie…
In a piece last week on Nightly News, Williams took Sergeant Major Tim Terpak, who just retired with three bronze stars, to a New York Rangers hockey game, where the vet was honored with a standing ovation by some 18,000 people at Madison Square Garden.
In honoring Terpak, Williams told the story of his helicopter being hit by an RPG, but that wasn’t accurate.
On Wednesday’s Nightly News, Williams admitted, “I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago.”
Williams and his team were actually in one of the aircraft following a Chinook helicopter that was hit.
I don’t buy that it was a “mistake” for a minute. Being in a helicopter that is hit by a rocket is a pretty traumatic experience – one not easily mistaken. And this was only 12 years ago when Williams was a fully grown man in the prime of his career. It is not like it was 40 years ago when he was a child.
Nope. He lied and got caught. Reminds me a lot of Rather…
Sept. 27, 1967 I was hit with pieces of a 57mm recoilless rifle round; on Dec. 4, 1967 I got in the way of some of the pieces of an RPG-7 round that hit my boat. Notwithstanding the devastation of realizing you’ve just been hit by enemy ordinance, there’s no mistaking the massive noise of an exploding RPG. In both cases my ears were still ringing when I left the field hospital.
Isn’t it amazing, no matter how famous a news reader becomes, and no matter how anti-war his reporting was, suddenly after a half-century they find combat to be desirable (without all that messy bleeding, however). I was in Vietnam when Walter Cronkite decreed, “The war is lost.” I now have no sympathy for little Brian.