[1] In February 2015, Williams was suspended by NBC News for six months for "misrepresent[ing] events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003".

[4][5] Williams announced in November 2021 that he would be leaving MSNBC and NBC News at the completion of his contract the following month, when he hosted his final episode of The 11th Hour.

[8] He is the son of Dorothy May (née Pampel) and Gordon Lewis Williams, who was an executive vice president of the National Retail Merchants Association, in New York.

[12] He did not earn a degree, ultimately interning in the White House Press office during the administration of President Jimmy Carter.

The following year he covered news in the Washington, D.C., area at then-independent station WTTG, then worked in Philadelphia for WCAU, then owned and operated by CBS.

[19] In the summer of 1996 he began serving as anchor and managing editor of The News with Brian Williams, broadcast on MSNBC and CNBC.

[22] His coverage of Hurricane Katrina was widely praised, particularly "for venting his anger and frustration over the government's failure to act quickly to help the victims.

"[23] The network was awarded a Peabody, the committee concluding that "Williams, and the entire staff of NBC Nightly News exemplified the highest levels of journalistic excellence.

[30] CNN reported in a 2005 television documentary that Williams said he was not a witness to the suicide: "We heard the story of a man killing himself, falling from the upper deck.

[34] At the announcement of the award, Cronkite said he was one of Williams' "ardent admirers" and described him as a "fastidious newsman" who brought credit to the television news reporting profession.

[4] News events that Williams had then covered for MSNBC include Pope Francis's trip to the United States; the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting; and terrorist attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, and Nice.

Williams, alongside co-anchors Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid and lead analyst Nicolle Wallace, led the network's coverage of the 2020 United States presidential election.

[56] Williams frequently appeared on The Daily Show as a celebrity guest interviewed by Jon Stewart and in 2007, made regular cameos as a giant head sidekick looking on Jon Stewart and helping out with pronunciations of foreign names and occasionally other foreign affairs all beginning at the premiere of the new Daily Show set.

He appeared on the Weekend Update segment of the season 32 premiere of Saturday Night Live, hosted by Dane Cook.

[58] Some in the media dubbed this the new "Battle of the Brians", as NBC's Williams compared his own modest set to CTV's expensive Olympic studio.

In April 2012, on the West Coast installment of the 30 Rock season 6 live show, Williams portrayed a news anchor covering the Apollo 13 story.

[70] Appearing on The Daily Show in August 2006, he told host Jon Stewart that he was nearly hit the previous month by Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah while flying in an Israeli Air Force (IAF) Black Hawk helicopter: "Here's a view of rockets I have never seen, passing underneath us, 1,500 feet beneath us.

"[72] The claim was drawn into question since there are no four-star generals in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israeli helicopter doors are routinely closed during flights and the IAF's Black Hawks do not carry gunners.

[78][79][80] On February 4, 2015, Williams apologized for and recanted his then-disproven Iraq War story, which he had told on a Nightly News broadcast on January 30, 2015.

[81][82] Soon after it aired, Williams' story was criticized by Lance Reynolds, a flight engineer on board one of the three Chinook helicopters that had been attacked.

[85] In his original on-air reporting of the incident on March 26, 2003, for Dateline NBC, Williams had said only that "the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky ... by an RPG" and made an emergency landing.

[82] A book published by NBC in 2003 said that "Army Chinook helicopters [were] forced to make a desert landing after being attacked by Iraqi Fedayeen", with Williams aboard.

Gladwell argued that the evolving versions of Williams' story over many years matched the normal pattern of how human memory works.

[94] Williams and his wife live in New Canaan,[95] and own a beach house in Bay Head, New Jersey[96] and a pied-à-terre in Midtown Manhattan.

[97] From 2006 to 2015, Williams was a member of the board of directors of the Medal of Honor Foundation; he resigned days after his suspension from NBC for lying.