The biggest news anchor in America has just been caught out lying on air. And there aren’t many people who are happy about it.

He has an average of 10 million viewers each night, hosting the number one news program in the US.

The star of the show, the anchor Brian Williams who earn over US$10 million a year has held the primo spot as the big dog in US news since 2004.

Brian Williams

But he’s now gaining fame for a different reason – lying on air and it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to let him off easily.

It began when last Friday on air when Brian Williams recalled the time he was travelling in a Chinook helicopter during the Iraq war that was shot at.

He generously thanked the “one special veteran” who saved his life at the time – and then thanked all the men and women who served in the war.

He was humble and gracious, still scarred by his very near death experience. Grateful to the man who saved him. Never forgetting how it changed the course of his life.

Er, maybe I wasn’t actually there..

The only thing is it never happened.

Immediately after he gave his account of the incident the pilot (who actually WAS in the helicopter) jumped aboard the NBC News Facebook page.

“Sorry dude, I don’t remember you being on my aircraft,” veteran Lance Reynolds wrote.

Oh. What do they call it? Humble pie?

Williams caught out in the lie was then forced to admit on air several days later that oh yes, he was not shot down in the Iraq War.

“I made a mistake in recalling the events of twelve years ago,” Williams estimated 10 million Americans watching the Nightly News broadcast.

“I want to apologise … I said I was travelling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire. I was instead in a following aircraft.”

He said that he was only trying in a bungled way to “thank one special veteran and by extension our brave military men and women, veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not.”

He said he had suffered “a misremember”.

It has since been pointed out that he has in fact misremembered the story several times in the media during his career including telling the same story on The Late Show with David Letterman years ago.

He told Letterman “We were in some helicopters. What we didn’t know was we were north of the invasion. We were the northern-most Americans in Iraq. We were going to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates so the Third Infantry could cross on them. Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in. RPG and AK-47.”

The same story turned up when he interviewed Alec Baldwin “I guess I do say to myself and to others — ‘I’ve got this’ — and I don’t know where that unbridled confidence comes from,” Williams told Baldwin

“Ridiculously stupid things under that banner, like being in a helicopter I had no business being in in Iraq with rounds coming into the airframe,”

It turned out that he probably was on board a helicopter in Iraq, just not that one, at that time, and his one was not shot at.

Brian Williams has since been forced to apologize writing on Facebook:

But social media isn’t going to forget …  with the hashtags #BrianWilliamsMemories and #BrianWilliamsMisremembers lighting up the Twittersphere.

And until the fog of memory invades Twitter Brian Williams is going to have a tough time misremembering this stuff-up.