NEW ORLEANS — Brian Williams is stepping down “for the next several days” from the “NBC Nightly News” anchor desk, he announced Saturday, as new details emerged of the disgraced newsman’s less-than-heroic tantrums during his ballyhooed Hurricane Katrina coverage.
“In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions,” Williams said in a note to NBC News staffers.
The fabulist anchor became the news — and an international punch line — after it was revealed last Wednesday that he had lied repeatedly about his helicopter supposedly crash-landing amid grenade fire while covering the Iraq war in 2003.
Other apparent whoppers by the highly paid laughing-stock — who just signed a $10-million-a-year contract for five years — have emerged in recent days, including that he might have lied about witnessing a suicide and watching a body float by his hotel window during his Katrina coverage.
“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 said in the note to fellow staffers.
He ended with optimism.
“Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.”
News of Williams’ hiatus came as Post sources in New Orleans cast new doubt on his repeated boasts of having toughed it out during the privations and violence of Hurricane Katrina’s ghastly aftermath.
In fact, the anchor bellyached about not getting his own hotel room — or even a hot cup of coffee during the worst of the 2005 hurricane’s aftermath, according to multiple sources who were employed at the four-star Ritz-Carlton where he stayed.
“He cried and complained when we explained why we couldn’t serve him coffee,” due to the lack of running water, one source said. “He literally almost started crying.”
Williams also showed his inner diva, balking at having to sleep on a mattress on the carpeted mezzanine level, according to a second hotel source.
“He acted scared to death,” the former employee said. “It was as if he was in fear of being on the floor all night next to hotel employees.”
In a Sundance Channel documentary, Williams has claimed he was sleeping on a mattress in a fifth-floor stairwell and had to be rescued by Matt Pincus, a young sheriff’s department officer who had been chauffeuring him around town.
Pincus “found me on a mattress on a hotel stairwell and brought me back and got me back to work,” he said in the 2006 documentary.
After his repeated broadcasts urging airdrops of vital water, food and supplies to the flooded city, Williams was hailed as a hero. Awards rolled in, including a George Foster Peabody Award and a George Polk Award.
Vanity Fair even gushed that his coverage was “Murrow-worthy.”
But he made no mention of any prima donna behavior in the documentary and instead thumped his chest.
“For a while, we were all in the same boat, and this should be stressed,” he said. “The media had no special incoming helicopter drops. We had the same problems with food and water supplies.”
“He can’t be gone long. The timing will be critical — too short and it won’t seem like he has taken himself out of the game long enough, and too long and he looks like damaged goods,” he said.