Brian Williams: Suspension was ‘torture’

Former NBC anchor Brian Williams delivered his first in-person apology since his suspension for misrepresenting his experiences during the Iraq War, telling NBC’s “Today” that the past few months have been “torture.”

“It has been absolutely necessary, I have discovered a lot of things,” Williams said in the interview that aired Friday.

“I have been listening to and watching what amounts to the black box recordings from my career. I’ve gone back through everything — basically 20 years of public utterances.”

{mosads}Williams said that as he read through news stories about him, he “would have given anything to get to the end of the story and have it be about someone else, but it was about me.”

“These statements I made, I own this; I own up to this and I have to go through and see and try to figure out how it happened,” he said.

NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack announced on Thursday that Williams would not return to “NBC Nightly News,” which will instead be hosted by Lester Holt. Williams is moving to MSNBC as anchor of breaking news and special reports.

The decision came months after Williams’s suspension and an NBC news investigation, which Thursday’s statement said discovered “a number of inaccurate statements about his own role and experiences.”

Williams said in the Friday interview that he always treated the facts with caution while reporting, but that once he left the newsroom, he used a “double standard” and “said things that weren’t true.”

“I told the story correctly for years before I told it incorrectly,” he claimed.

He ascribed his mistakes to “ego” that made him think he had to misrepresent his experiences.

“This came from clearly a bad place, a bad urge inside me,” Williams said.

“This was clearly ego-driven, a desire to better my role in a story I was already in. That’s what I’ve been tearing apart and unpacking and analyzing.”

Williams’s career began to unravel when news outlets questioned his recounting of an experience in the Iraq War, when he said he had been flying in a helicopter that had been shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Soldiers that Williams traveled with in 2003 told the media that he had not been in that helicopter and flew well before another group of Chinooks faced enemy fire.