Brian Williams Comes Clean on ‘Pig Gate’

You can say this about the NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams: it takes more than a phony animal-rescue video to rattle his cage.

On Tuesday, The New York Times published a report about a popular viral video that appeared to show a pig saving a baby goat that had become stuck in the pond of a petting zoo, but which was in fact an elaborately staged production created on “Nathan For You,” a new Comedy Central series.

When this viral video was first whizzing around the Internet in September, passed along by viewers who believed it depicted authentic events, it was also broadcast on several network and cable television news programs, inclding NBC’s “Nightly News.” (Before showing the clip, Mr. Williams had at least cautioned his audience, saying, “We have no way of knowing if it’s real.”)

With the video now shown to be staged, Mr. Williams said Tuesday on the “Nightly News”: “While we said at the time we have no way of knowing if it was real, despite checking, we now know it wasn’t. We can all thank Comedy Central for the hard work of a crew of 20 people, including scuba divers, animal trainers and humane officers. So well done, there.”

In his calmly cheeky manner, Mr. Williams dubbed the incident “Pig Gate,” a term we expect to see trending any minute now on search engines and social networks.