Amazon’s Prime Video has reportedly selected veteran TV anchor Brian Williams, who was suspended from NBC in 2015 for making false statements, to lead its coverage of election night on Nov. 5.
Williams’ deal with Amazon represents his first time back at an anchor desk since leaving NBC in 2021, according to Puck News.
The returning news anchor’s suspension from NBC followed Williams’ false claim in 2015 that a military helicopter he was traveling in during his coverage of the war in Iraq was forced to land after being hit by a rocket, a story the helicopter’s pilots later said was false, according to PBS News.
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“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said in a January 2015 broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”
Williams attempted to amend his story to say that an RPG hit the Chinook in front of him, but the pilots of the helicopter he was flying in told the New York Times that the aircraft struck by a rocket was actually in a different group of vehicles altogether.
“I want to apologize, I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire, I was instead in a following aircraft,” Williams said on air shortly after being called out by members of the armed forces for his story. “This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and by extension our brave military men and women veterans everywhere.”
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Williams’ helicopter story isn’t the only false statement he has made about his coverage of the armed forces. He said during a 2011 broadcast that he had “the great honor of flying into Baghdad with [SEAL Team 6] at the start of the war.”
A Special Operations Command spokesman, however, told the Huffington Post that journalists are not embedded in counter-terrorism in the way described by Williams, with a SEAL officer also telling CNN that the event the anchor described could not have happened.
Williams also claimed to have been at the Berlin Wall the day it fell, a claim a source at NBC News later said was false, according to CNN.
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Signing off NBC for the last time in 2021, Williams used his final monologue to say that supporters of former President Donald Trump have spread “the darkness on the edge of town” to “the main roads and highways and neighborhoods, the local bar, the bowling alley, the school board and the grocery store,” The Washington Times reported.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.