(by Peter Foster, Daily Telegraph) Washington, DC — He was the most trusted face on American television, a…newsman in the Olympian tradition of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, but after being caught lying about his role covering the Iraq War, the 20-year career of Brian Williams from NBC’s Nightly News now looks to be in ruins.

His problems began earlier this week when Mr. Williams paid tribute to a group of US veterans by retelling the story of how his helicopter “was forced down after being hit by an RPG” during the 2003 Iraq War, leaving him and his film crew stranded in the desert for two long, scary nights.

The story, while gripping enough, had just one flaw; it wasn’t true.

Williams had in fact been travelling in a helicopter some 30 minutes behind the one that was shot down, as several indignant veterans told Stars and Stripes, the US forces’ newspaper, although he did spend two nights in the desert.

“The NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire,” the paper reported, quoting crew members from the 159th Aviation Regiment who were flying the helicopters.

Now truly under fire, Williams scrambled to apologize – admitting on air that he had erroneously “conflated” and “misremembered” the incident, but only dug himself further into trouble as it emerged that the 55-year-old newsman had been “misremembering” for some time.

A chronological analysis of his retelling of the story over the years showed that Williams had been gradually embellishing the tale to the point where, in 2013, he told late night TV host David Letterman that “two of our four helicopters were hit by groundfire, including the one I was in.”

Pundits from across the US media are now openly questioning whether Williams can survive the embarrassment with his credibility in tact.

As the story spread, he was being mercilessly mocked on social media, with Twitter and Facebook posts showing him “reporting live” everywhere from the beaches of Normandy to the surface of the moon.

“Journalists are paid to be more vigilant than civilians about the stories they tell. Millions listen to Williams because he’s sold himself as a truth-teller, not a fabulist,” wrote Jack Shafer of Politico in one of several articles that asked if Williams could ever be trusted again.

Although NBC was reported to be standing by Williams, fresh revelations on Friday about his tendency to embellish – this time about his award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina – were intensifying pressure on the $10 million-a-year anchor whose Nightly News program is the top-rated news show in America.

Recalling the hurricane that left much of New Orleans inundated, Williams said in 2006 that he had looked out of the window of his French Quarter hotel and seen “a man float by face down” just like he’d seen the previous year in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, while covering the 2004 tsunami.

He added in another intensely self-regarding interview that “I became very sick with dysentery” from accidentally ingesting the floodwaters, while his hotel “was overrun with gangs” and he was “rescued in the stairwell of a five-star hotel in New Orleans by a young police officer.”

The veracity [truthfulness; accuracy] of these stories was challenged by The New Orleans Advocate, one of Louisiana’s oldest newspapers, who pointed out that the French Quarter was never under water and quoted local medical officials saying there were no recorded cases of dysentery.

“I don’t know anybody that’s tried [drinking the floodwaters],” Dr. Brobson Lutz, a former city health director who manned the emergency station near Williams’s hotel told the Advocate, “but my dogs drank it, and they didn’t have any problems.”

The latest story only fuelled the speculation that Williams would have to resign, with New York Daily News among several outlets to opine that: “The flood waters are rising on Brian Williams’s career.”

Reprinted here from London’s Daily Telegraph for educational purposes only.  May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from the Daily Telegraph.