Last Updated on February 12, 2022
After months of wondering what NBC News would decide about the fate of former ‘NBC Nightly News’ anchor Brian Williams, we may have our answer.
Let me get this straight: NBC is apparently not interested in having Brian Williams return to the anchor chair for its NBC Nightly News because of potential “credibility issues” since Williams came under fire for “embellishing” personal accounts of his own journalistic exploits.
And instead, they’re moving him to MSNBC, where he’ll be the guy who covers breaking news?
Does that make any sense to you?
Breaking news, after all, can be a make-or-break deal for a network — at least for a few hours until the next breaking story happens and everyone forgets who was and wasn’t first with the previous one.
Still, with the importance most networks face on being first and being accurate, breaking news coverage is a very important role for any journalist.
So if you ran a network and worried that your audience couldn’t trust your main anchor at the main anchor desk, why would you possibly put him on the breaking news anchor desk?
As USA Today’s Rem Rieder puts it, it doesn’t say much for NBC’s sister network:
What does that say about MSNBC? That its standards are far, far lower than NBC’s? That it’s truly second-rate? What a horrible way to treat a property.
I expected the network to assign Williams to host some sort of news/talk hybrid show where the atmosphere might be more relaxed but could still hit on big stories from a discussion rather than coverage standpoint.
