Rieder: The Brian Williams endgame
The Brian Williams endgame is approaching.
It's been four months since NBC News suspended its marquee personality without pay for half a year for exaggerating, not to say fabricating, his reporting exploits. It's unlikely the network will wait another two months before deciding his fate.
It's equally unlikely NBC will restore Williams to the anchor throne at NBC Nightly News. His credibility has taken too many — and many severe — hits.
There's the possibility that Williams returns to NBC in another role. Andrew Lack, the former NBC News head honcho brought back to clean up the mess at the embattled news operation, is fond of Williams. In fact, it was Lack who groomed Williams for stardom.
But it would make more sense for NBC and Williams to part company, with a no doubt lucrative settlement for the highly paid anchor, and with Williams ultimately resurfacing with his own show in another venue.
Williams' departure would pave the way for Lester Holt, who has been doing a fine job filling in since Williams was benched. He's a consummate pro who is all about the news rather than the celebrity shenanigans that did in Williams.
Under Holt, NBC has been in a back-and-forth dogfight for supremacy with ABC's World News Tonight with David Muir. Last week, ABC led both in the coveted 25-to-54 demographic (I know. Who knew network news had one?), where it has consistently had the upper hand recently, and in overall audience. But the race between the two had tightened significantly even before the Williams controversy erupted.
Should he get the nod, Holt would become the first African American to serve as solo host of a nightly network newscast.
Andrew Tyndall monitors television news for a living, chronicling it on the Tyndall Report. It's his view that moving beyond Williams make sense for NBC News for a variety of reasons.
"Williams' celebrity, the size of his contract and the accompanying promotional efforts to make him the face of NBC News are all throwbacks to a previous generation of television, when the networks truly were mass media and when viewers had many fewer options about where to get their news," Tyndall says. "The skills that NBC News highlighted in Williams were those that made him a likable household name — his gifts as a talk show raconteur, his everyman charm — but also the ones that caused his problems in the first place. In a post-mass-media age, a news organization should promote itself on the basis of its journalism not on the basis of celebrity charm. Williams' special (and expensive) skills are therefore anachronistic."
And that, in Tyndall's view, is where Holt comes in.
"Lester Holt has demonstrated that the evening newscast is first and foremost a correspondent's medium, not an anchor's medium," Tyndall says. "The anchor's role is to string the newscast's various component packages together rather than to deliver actual reporting. As such, the anchor's identity is relatively unimportant, so not worth the turmoil of a controversial recall."
The Williams kerfuffle exploded in February after it came out that the anchor had lied about being in a helicopter that was forced down by enemy fire during the Iraq War. At first there was an ill-conceived effort on the part of some of Williams' supporters to marginalize the issue, as if the fact that the broadcaster had made the false claim on The Late Show with David Letterman somehow didn't count because that wasn't his day, or evening, job. (Never mind that he later repeated it on the newscast.)
But as more questions emerged about Williams' braggadocio regarding his experiences in dangerous locales, it became clear to most that the damage to his credibility was such that it made Williams' role as an anchor untenable.
There's also the school of thought that all of this is much ado about nothing, that the anchor of the nightly news doesn't matter because the newscasts are simply an irrelevant relic of a long-past era, honeycombed with pharmaceutical ads and watched by a diminishing pool of old-timers. But it's important to remember that while they have declined over the years, the newscasts have a combined audience of more than 22 million people, which is not nothing.
It remains important that the person at the helm of those relics can be counted on to tell the truth.