The Media Conveyor Belt, 2015

UPDATED 9/30/19

At Politico, Mike Allen wrote "Playbook," an extremely influential tipsheet/aggregator page.

Playbook:

Lead 1A story of New Orleans Advocate (edition of Baton Rouge paper), “Anchor’s Katrina claims raise doubts: Williams said he saw floating body in Quarter,” by New Orleans Advocate’s John Simerman: “‘When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,’ Williams said in a 2006 interview. ... But the French Quarter, the original high ground of New Orleans, was not impacted by the floodwaters that overwhelmed the vast majority of the city.”

Go to the Advocate story:

NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who apologized on the air Wednesday night for lying about an experience covering the Iraq War, is now facing scrutiny over his gripping accounts of Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that burnished his nightly news bona fides almost a decade ago.

Williams’ account of seeing a body float by in the French Quarter — which remained largely dry — and even a claim of catching dysentery from drinking Katrina floodwaters have raised eyebrows among bloggers and elsewhere since he took it on the chin this week over a claim that he rode in a helicopter that was downed by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq.

Click the second link in the passage above, which takes you to HotAir:  (Click here for background on HotAir.)

NBC News anchor Brian Williams is in quite a bit of trouble over his admission that his decade-long claim to have endured heavy fire while flying in a military helicopter over Baghdad in 2003 was a fabrication. Accordingly, journalists are beginning to review other extraordinary claims Williams made over the course of his career, and they are not short on material to parse.

The team over at GotNews [now shuttered -- 9/30/19 update] flagged an interesting moment from a 2006 interview in which Williams waxed regretful about the devastating flooding in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

What was GotNews? A site by Charles Johnson:

Embattled NBC anchor Brian Williams claimed in a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner that someone he had met during Katrina later died. Williams also claims that a body was floating by his hotel room in the French quarter.

“When you look out of your hotel room — window, in the French Quarter, and watch a–a man float–float by face-down, when–when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country, I beat the storm,” Williams said.

Williams returned to it at the conclusion of his Eisner interview to stress his connection to the audience. “These are Americans. These are my brothers and sisters and one of them was floating by,” he said with emphasis and pathos.

UPDATE