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DailyBoom Your Old School Music Authority

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Brian Williams 'Misremembering' is Limiting MSNBC's Katrina Anniversary Coverage

If you have watched any news coverage over the last few days then surely you realize that his weekend marks the ten year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Back in 2005 the monster storm wrecked havoc on New Orleans and left the ninth ward only slightly intact. Most news coverage has sent anchors back to the once-devastated area to see how things have been rebuilt and sadly, in many cases, how they have not. When NBC opened a full investigation of Brian Williams reporting they quickly realized that he had a bad habit of "misremembering" many prominent stories and embellishing to make himself part of the drama. This included his coverage of Katrina and MSNBC's programming is now affected by that.

The network has struggled with ratings and credibility issues over the last few years and while some sweeping changes have been made in recent months, they are also stuck with Williams. Rather than NBC firing their fallen evening news anchor they instead have shuffled him over to MSNBC, which quite frankly, won't help their credibility issues.

According to a report by Page Six, "MSNBC is sensitive about Brian Williams and his reporting on Katrina. None of their anchors are there this weekend. Brian’s mid-September start date was carefully scheduled to avoid the Katrina anniversary, among other considerations.” Williams had spoken of seeing a dead body float past his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton in the French Quarter. He said that gangs had “overrun” the place and claimed that he got dysentery and the hotel had no medicine. But then-manager Myra ­DeGersdorff said the Ritz-Carlton was secure, there had been a medical unit on-site, and told the Washington Post, “Maybe he misremembered . . . It wasn’t impossible he could have encountered a body, but I don’t think it was in the French Quarter."

Supposedly the network is already ticked that they are stuck with Williams. Having to not report on such a significant story in American history has to be making the already bad blood even worse, don't you think?