Washington Post Questions Williams’ Hezbollah Chopper Story

Without crediting those online [UPDATE: Via Twitter Farhi told me he credited New Media in an earlier report.] who were the first to find, report, and highlight this story the previous day, The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi is at least reporting on the wild discrepancy in Brian Williams’s tale of a helicopter he was riding in being buzzed by Hezbollah rocket fire over Israel in 2006.

In a 2006 report, Williams made no mention of ever being in any kind of danger. A year or so later he told a student interviewer that the rockets passed “just beneath” his helicopter.

In a 2007 interview, Williams described a close encounter with rockets fired by Hezbollah as he flew over northern Israel in an Israeli military helicopter.

“There were Katyusha rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in,” he told a student interviewer from Fairfield (Conn.) University that year.

But Williams didn’t mention that in his own account of the helicopter trip, written on an NBC News blog in July the previous year. …

Williams wrote that he noticed “trails of smoke and dust” where rockets had landed in the countryside. “Then,” he wrote, “I noticed something out the window. From a distance of six miles, I witnessed a rocket launch. A rising trail of smoke, then a second rocket launch, an orange flash and more smoke — as a rocket heads off toward Israel.”

The description suggests that Williams’s helicopter was near the rockets but does not claim the weapons were flying “just beneath” his airborne vehicle.

Online media has been first to dig up and highlight many of the apparent tall tales Williams has told outside of the Iraq helicopter incident.

John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC