In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: Published on Jun 26, 2014 
  
 NBC News anchors Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams interview each other at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University series "The duPont Talks." In this clip, a decade later, Tom Brokaw asks Brian Williams about his first big test as an anchor - covering Hurricane Katrina. The coverage won NBC News the coveted duPont-Columbia Award. ||||| Photo: Judi Bottoni/© NBC Universal, Inc. 
  
 In the wake of Brian Williams’s on-air apology for exaggerating (or lying, or perhaps just misremembering) a story he’s told many times about his helicopter coming under fire during the Iraq War, NBC has remained silent. But now sources tell the Daily News that the network is launching an internal investigation, led by Richard Esposito, to look into Williams’s claims. 
  
 It’s seeming more and more unlikely now that the scandal surrounding one of NBC’s biggest stars will blow over, as the NBC Nightly News anchor’s stories about Hurricane Katrina have also come into question. Over the years, Williams has described seeing a body float by his hotel in the French Quarter, though the area was not heavily flooded like the rest of New Orleans, and made some other strange claims about his time reporting on the storm. 
  
 On Thursday, GotNews highlighted a video in which Williams describes the morning after the storm hit. “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 … ” Williams says in a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. 
  
 As Eisner makes clear in the clip, Hurricane Katrina is a key moment in the Brian Williams origin story. He had taken over for NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw less than a year before and was one of the first reporters on the scene. His coverage of the storm earned the show a Peabody Award and an Emmy, among other accolades. 
  
 The question is whether there was enough water in the French Quarter for Williams to see a man “float by face-down” right outside his hotel. In the special In His Own Words: Brian Williams on Hurricane Katrina, which first aired in October 2005 on the Sundance Channel, the anchor recalls the the morning of August 30, 2005 (but does not mention seeing a body at this point). “I went to the window and I remember thinking what the hell is that?” he says. “There were, as best I can describe it, there were shards of light going across the street. Like someone had put up a disco ball over the French Quarter overnight. And I knew exactly what I was looking at. That was water. The levees had given way overnight.” 
  
 The French Quarter is on high ground, and there are numerous reports on how the area was mostly spared. However, that doesn’t prove that Williams concocted an elaborate lie about waking up to flood water that wasn’t there. Shortly after the storm, the New York Times reported that the French Quarter “remained mostly dry,” but the accompanying map shows that some streets on the edges of the district were flooded. An Associated Press report from August 30, 2005 says that on Canal Street, which is one block past the boundary of the French Quarter, “Some in the crowd splashed into the waist-deep water like giddy children at the beach.” 
  
 It does seem that the story about the body has shifted over the years. In a blog post on August 30, 2005, Williams does not mention a floating body, but writes, “Tuesday, we found the body of a dead man on the street corner.” (The footage is undated, but four and a half minutes into this video, also from In His Own Words, Williams shows a body on a street corner.) In the clip below from a 2010 interview with Charlie Rose, Williams mentions a floating body, but he doesn’t spot it from his hotel room. “I actually heard someone say to me on the street of New Orleans ‘be careful because there’s a body floating this way,’” he says. 
  
 That’s not the only part of Williams’s Katrina story that’s come into question. Four minutes into the video below, Williams recalls more incredible events from New Orleans. (To add an extra layer of awkwardness, he’s interviewed by Tom Brokaw, who “Page Six” claims “wants Williams’ head on a platter” over the Iraq fib.) “I accidentally ingested some of the flood water,” Williams says. “I became very sick with dysentery. Our hotel was overrun with gangs. I was rescued in the stairwell of a five-star hotel in New Orleans by a young police officer. We are friends to this day.” 
  
 Dr. Brobson Lutz, a former city health director who manned an EMS trailer in the French Quarter during the storm, tells the New Orleans Advocate that he finds that claim dubious. “I saw a lot of people with cuts and bruises and such, but I don’t recall a single, solitary case of gastroenteritis during Katrina or in the whole month afterward,” he said. As for Williams drinking flood water, Lutz said, “I don’t know anybody that’s tried that to see, but my dogs drank it, and they didn’t have any problems.” 
  
 Still, this isn’t conclusive proof that Williams was lying about getting sick. There were fears of a dysentery outbreak after the storm, and according to a CDC report from September 2005, some evacuees did suffer from “diarrheal disease,” but not dysentery. 
  
 CDC received reports of clusters of diarrheal disease among persons in evacuation centers in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. In Louisiana, approximately 20 clusters of diarrheal illness in evacuation centers were reported and investigated. In Memphis, Tennessee, gastrointestinal illness was the most common acute disease complaint among evacuees. Approximately 1,000 cases of diarrhea and vomiting were reported among adult and child evacuees in Mississippi and Texas; tests detected norovirus in stool specimens from patients in Texas. Sporadic nontyphoidal Salmonella, nontoxigenic V. cholerae O1, and other infections were identified. No confirmed cases of Shigella dysentery, typhoid fever, or infection by toxigenic V. cholerae O1 were reported in evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. Three weeks after the initial displacement caused by Katrina, few cases of diarrheal disease were being reported. 
  
 There’s also the question of whether Williams actually witnessed the suicide in the Superdome. In the Brokaw interview, he says “We watched, all of us watched, as one man committed suicide.” Six and a half minutes into the video below, from In His Own Words, Williams says, “We’d heard the story of a man killing himself falling from the upper deck.” 
  
 Many members of the media made false reports in the chaos after Hurricane Katrina, and we know that Williams witnessed many disturbing events because hours of NBC News footage was broadcast live on TV. It’s possible that over the years, Williams conflated events, said he witnessed something he actually watched a correspondent report on, or assumed his illness was something more serious than it actually was. It’s also possible he knowingly exaggerated key facts to bolster his personal mythology. Either way, now that it looks like the Iraq story may be part of a pattern, Williams will probably have to recount his Katrina experiences again, and with much clearer details. 
  
 An "NBC truth squad" has reportedly been designated to look into Williams’s Katrina claims, and NBC News president Deborah Turness told the team she’s putting "100 percent of her time, day and night, to sort this out." Sources also told the Daily News that Williams himself showed up at the NBC News morning meeting Friday and personally apologized to the group, saying, "This one’s on me." ||||| Photo: Monica Schipper/Getty Images 
  
 For years, NBC News anchor Brian Williams has been telling the dramatic story of the time he was in a helicopter that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2003. The teensy problem with this: It wasn’t true. 
  
 After being called out via social media this week, Williams recanted his story — he was, he now says, in the helicopter behind the one that was hit. In a statement on Facebook, Williams blamed the false story on “the fog of memory” that had crept in over the years, and he expanded on that in an interview with the U.S. military news site Stars and Stripes. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another,” he said. Now some people, outraged at the apparent lie, are calling for NBC to fire Williams. 
  
 It is certainly possible that Williams made the whole thing up, as some who say they were there say there are holes in the story he’s telling now, too. (Some are claiming Williams didn’t even arrive at the scene until an hour after the fact.) But it’s also entirely plausible — however unlikely — that Williams is telling the truth, said all of the memory researchers I contacted today, including Elizabeth Loftus, a leading expert on the implantation of false memories. The human memory is a weird, mysterious thing. 
  
 “A lot of people want to say he was deliberately lying, but I think we should give him a break,” Loftus said. We tend to believe that memory works like a video camera, dutifully recording every detail we’ve personally witnessed. But Loftus has compared the human memory to something more akin to a Wikipedia page, in that you’re able to make edits — and so can other people, to your own memories. And she should know: She’s spent her career deliberately planting false memories into the minds of the people who’ve volunteered to take part in her studies. “We’ve been planting what we call rich false memory for decades now,” Loftus said. “We and others can get people to believe these very detailed events happened to them — that you were lost in a shopping mall and frightened and crying, that you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard, that you were attacked by an animal.” 
  
 In one experiment, she recruited 24 individuals, ranging in age from 18 to 53; she also contacted family members of those individuals and asked them to tell her a few stories from their past. When she brought her 24 study participants into her lab, she handed them a booklet containing three stories: two that had really happened to them (as corroborated by their family member) and one that had not. Their task was to write what they remembered about each event; if they did not remember it, they were simply to write, “I don’t remember this.” 
  
 The made-up memory was a detailed story about getting lost in a shopping mall as a child, crying, getting comforted by an elderly woman at the mall, and, finally, a happy reunion with family. Seven of the 24 participants said they remembered this happening, and many also added more details to the story. In two follow-up interviews, six of them continued to assert that this had really happened to them. 
  
 Most of the work Loftus described to me focused on implanting false childhood memories, something we’ve written about before, and it’s not so surprising to think that our real memories from our earliest years may be hazy enough to allow a few fake ones to take root. But she says she’s also successfully tricked study volunteers into believing in a fake memory supposedly from their adolescence. “We tell them, You got sick drinking vodka, and then they don’t want to drink vodka anymore,” she said. And even memories from adulthood can be reconstructed, said Doug Bermingham, who studies memory at the University of Utah. He’s worked with veterans who’ve misremembered some incredibly dramatic events. “Some, after years of telling themselves that what happened was their fault (e.g., buddy dying because they turned left instead of right and then drove over a mine), [they] actually believe this, and their memory has changed as a product of this,” Bermingham said in an email. 
  
 Back to Williams, who said yesterday that “the constant viewing of the video showing us inspecting the impact area … made me conflate the two.” Bermingham said that this statement made him wonder if “after repeated inspections and discussions about the event, he began to conflate his location in all of it.” Or, here’s another possible scenario: Perhaps he embellished the story once, and then kept embellishing it; then, as the years went by, he genuinely started to believe the story he was telling. Because, Bermingham said, the way you remember an event once has implications on the way you continue to remember it in the future. “This is called the fuzzy-trace theory of memory,” Bermingham said. “So if Williams was asked about his time in the helicopter, and there were indeed bullets flying — and I can only imagine he’s been asked to tell the story hundreds of times — he may have focused more on the bullets flying, to the point that that became more central to his memory.” 
  
 According to a timeline from CNN, Williams’s story starts to get dicey in 2007, when he says that all of the helicopters, including the one he was in, came under fire. “If that was a genuine mistake rather than a purposeful lie, then that may have been the beginning of the change in his memory,” Bermingham said. “From a cognitive psychology standpoint, we call this ‘assimilation’ — memories are changed to fit certain beliefs. … Maybe Williams has consciously or unconsciously changed his memory to fit the belief that the event was actually worse than it was.” 
  
 Another memory researcher, Charan Ranganath at the University of California, Davis, called Williams’s story “hard, but not at all impossible to believe. Memory is totally weird like that.” |||||
A: 
Brian Williams has been apologizing for falsely recalling being on a helicopter that came under fire in Iraq. Now, more controversy regarding the NBC anchor's memory issues: The New Orleans Advocate says claims he made while covering Hurricane Katrina in 2005—including an account of contracting dysentery and watching a man's body float by—have "raised eyebrows." "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 … Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country," he said of New Orleans conditions post-storm in a 2006 interview with Michael Eisner. But the French Quarter is elevated, the Advocate notes, and largely wasn't hit by floodwaters that devastated much of the city—though New York magazine does point out reported instances where French Quarter areas did appear to have been flooded. In an interview with Tom Brokaw last year, Williams also revealed he had "accidentally ingested some of the floodwater" and "became very sick with dysentery." But a former city health director tells the Advocate that "I don't recall a single ... case of gastroenteritis during Katrina or in the whole month afterward"; he adds he also doesn't know of anyone who consumed floodwater, but "my dogs drank it, and they didn't have any problems." Also questionable, as per New York, is Williams' story of witnessing a suicide in the Louisiana Superdome. In the Brokaw interview, Williams says he witnessed the suicide firsthand; in NBC's In His Own Words documentary, he says, "We'd heard the story of a man killing himself falling from the upper deck." Is it possible that Williams is really just having unintentional mind melts? According to memory researchers interviewed in New York, it's unlikely, but still possible. "Memory is totally weird like that," one says.