NY Magazine: NBC Compiled a "Dossier of Lies" on Williams; Began Looking Into His Expense Accounts

Investigating his expense accounts?! Party foul man; you know as well as anyone that expense accounts are vehicles of pure imagination, through which we live our most wonderful fantasies.

Expense accounts are like lucid dreaming but with numbers.

Anyway.

TheNightly News anchor and his agent met with NBC Universal CEO Steve Burke in the last 24 hours, and were presented with a dossier of Williams’s apparent lies, according to sources.

One can only imagine that Williams was wishing his anchor escape plan had worked out and that he was the host of The Tonight Show right now. According to two NBC insiders, when the network decided to move on from Jay Leno a few years ago, Williams lobbied NBC executives to give him the host’s chair. "Brian wants to be a late-night comedian," one former colleague explained. "He traded on being Nightly News anchorman-war-reporter to ingratiate himself with Jimmy, Lorne Michaels, and Jon Stewart."

That's because he's an idiot.

So as usual this is about insecurity. In Williams case, it was about...

...

While the speed of Williams's crash has stunned NBC staffers -- "the cannibalism that’s going on here is so ferocious," one told me -- many people inside NBC News knew about Williams's tendency to exaggerate the now-infamous helicopter ride in Iraq. "He was never a field reporter. He was incredibly insecure about it," one former NBC News staffer said, speculating about why the anchor felt the need to exaggerate.

The other thing that clearly bothered him, and almost surely was an important factor in his insecurity and cloying for respect, is that he was not a college graduate in a field dominated by the Upper Middle Class white college-educated northeastern liberal class.

...

The network announced today that Richard Esposito, the senior producer conducting the fact-checking investigation of Williams's statements, will continue his inquiry. The fact that NBC lawyers are said to be reviewing the list of Williams's fictions is an ominous sign. Another source told me today that NBC has widened their probe to include Williams's expense accounts....

Hot Air links a Politico piece noting that after the David Gregory fiasco and the Ann Curry debacle (I don't even know what the hell that is, by the way), the long knives are coming for NBC News executives.

Expense Accounts&bodytext=Investigating his expense accounts?! Party foul man; you know as well as anyone that expense accounts are vehicles of pure imagination, through which we live our most wonderful fantasies. Expense accounts are like lucid dreaming but with numbers. Anyway. TheNightly...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 01:19 PM

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