Ever since Brian Williams imploded in one of the most spectacular career nose-dives I’ve ever seen, I’ve been waiting to hear “the inside story.” You knew it was coming, and here it is. Vanity Fair has an epic, insider-y media story on just what went down with Williams’ implosion and who is to blame – you can read the full piece here. Vanity Fair honestly excels at this kind of reporting, and they got many NBC insiders and executives to go on the record about everything going on behind the scenes. Williams wasn’t the only one getting slammed though – many inside NBC believe that Comcast is to blame (Comcast bought NBC in 2011), and some blame NBC News chief Deborah Turness for letting “the on-air talent” run wild. People aren’t just mad at Brian Williams either – it seems like Matt Lauer is pretty hated within NBC too. Here’s one excerpt from VF’s story:

Deborah Turness learned the startling news: the most important person at the network, the face of NBC News, its anchorman Brian Williams, had apparently been exaggerating an anecdote about coming under fire in a U.S. Army helicopter during the Iraq war in 2003. A reporter from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes had called about it that morning. Williams was supposed to talk to him off the record in an effort to determine what the reporter planned to write. Instead, to the dismay of NBC’s P.R. staff, Williams had gone on the record and admitted he hadn’t been telling the truth, not only on a Nightly News broadcast the previous week but also over the years at public appearances and on talk shows.

Stunned, Turness was still trying to grasp the gravity of the situation when the Stars and Stripes story went online. At that point her biggest concern was the apology Williams was preparing to read to viewers on his broadcast that evening. He was already taping segments as he and Turness began swapping e-mails on its all-important wording. Turness and the other executives who had gotten involved quickly became frustrated, as they would remain for days, with Williams’s inability to explain himself. “He couldn’t say the words ‘I lied,’ ” recalls one NBC insider. “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.”

And that was a problem. Because the apology Williams read on the air that evening not only failed to limit the damage to his reputation, and to NBC News, its elliptical wording—“I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago”—made a bad situation worse, inflaming a crisis that led a week later to Williams’s suspension for six months.

[From Vanity Fair]

It’s sort of amazing that Williams thought the NBC Nightly News was his personal venue to handle his personal crisis without any input from anyone else. It sounds like everyone around Williams was like “Dude, just fall on your sword, say you lied and let’s move past this.” And he just refused. Oh, and “brain tumor”? Dude… no.

What else is in the article? Let’s see… a “former top NBC exec” lays the blame completely at Comcast, saying their takeover has been “a nightmare.” Another executive is quoted saying this: “News is a very particular thing, NBC is a very particular beast, and Deborah, well, she really doesn’t have a f–king clue. She’s letting the inmates run the asylum. You have kids? Well, if you let them, they’ll have ice cream every night. Same thing in TV. If you let the people on air do what they want, whenever they want, this is what happens.” Another “former executive” says it’s not Turness’ problem because she “walked into a complete sh-tstorm” and “Today is a horror show. Brian Williams? He didn’t give a rat’s ass what Deborah Turness says.”

Sigh… I love it when a situation gets so terrible that everyone (even those even tangentially involved) starts sniping at each other in the press. Super professional for these world-class news professionals, right?

Photos courtesy of WENN.