Brian Williams has been suspended from NBC News since February and now details on how the company handled the situation are coming to light.
In an exclusive report from Vanity Fair, some of the biggest names in NBC's news division opened up about Williams. One insider said what annoyed NBC's executives most was the anchor's unwillingness to simply admit he lied about the 2003 story of his helicopter crashing in Iraq.
"He couldn't say the words 'I lied,'" the insider told Vanity Fair. "We could not force his mouth to form the words 'I lied.' He couldn't explain what had happened. [He said,] 'Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head?' He just didn't know. We just didn't know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best [apology] we could get."
It's highly unlikely that a brain tumor is behind Williams' consistently fabricating a story. His stories were always grandiose in nature, multiple people told the magazine. One former executive even said Williams believed he was running the peacock's news division before its chief, Steve Capus, left in 2013:
"[Williams] very quickly came to believe that he was the person running the news division, not Capus. As Capus was kind of dissed more and more to and by [Steve] Burke and, ultimately, Pat Fili, Brian just saw that as an opportunity to run a truck through the news division and get whatever he wanted. Suddenly he's appearing on all these shows, 'Jimmy Fallon' and '30 Rock' and everything else. This spread the idea in Brian's mind that he was this kind of newsman-entertainer. That he was a national raconteur."
That's not all. On the topic of Capus getting pushed out of the doors at 30 Rockefeller Center, another former NBC executive said Williams "took Steve down."
"If Brian could've eaten there eight days a week he would've," the former executive said. "He would hold court at some table, with some poor mid-level schmo who didn't know what was going on, and he always seemed to be there when Steve Burke would come in. And [with Burke in earshot], he would make a point of taking someone down a notch. It could be Pat or Steve [Capus] or [P.R. chief] Adam [Miller] or someone else, but over time it got to be Steve Capus a lot. Brian took Steve down.
"I heard those lunches. I know what he said. He got Burke and Pat Fili very riled up about Steve."
It still remains to be seen what will happen to Williams when his suspension is over and he is once again allowed to sit at the "NBC Nightly News" anchor desk.
