#Who replaced brian williams professional

#Who replaced brian williams professional

It is, I suppose, an effort to do something other than give Williams the professional death penalty, but it could also look like Williams, aiming in the words of his apology to “earn back trust,” is also trying to earn his way back into Holt’s chair. Not to mention that, per NBC, Williams will anchor NBC special reports when Holt is unavailable. It also sends a message that MSNBC is NBC News’ purgatory, and at exactly the moment when the mothership is trying to revive the cable networks’ ratings. And you can make a perfectly credible argument that anchors bear a public trust, which trust is shattered when they tell lies, on the newscast or off. He’s not credible enough to anchor one NBC network, but he’s just fine for the other? You could make a perfectly defensible argument that, look, anchors are newsreaders, and while Williams told a lie, he’s no less suited for the job.

If Williams earned his position and his big salary through an unspoken agreement between news networks and their audiences–that anchors are monumental figures whose level of “trust” and “authority” is essential to the credibility of the networks’ reporting–then he’s got no place to complain after he threw his value out the door of a chopper.īut Williams’ demotion/life preserver–a new job as breaking news anchor for MSNBC–sends an odd mixed message. Live by the myth of the anchor, die by the myth of the anchor. Still, that was the deal, Williams violated it and in strictly professional terms, his punishment was fair. Objectively, there was less reason to trust Brian Williams as a person, but practically, there was no real reason to trust NBC’s news any more or less. But it’s not as if there are many opportunities for Williams’ weird personal mythmaking to make their way into the newscast on a regular basis–it would actually be a bigger concern if he were still out in the field reporting. That’s not to diminish anchors: you have to work your way into those jobs, and they usually come with significant managing-editor responsibilities. The vast NBC News division sends out reporters, produces a product and gives it to an anchor to present to you, like the headwaiter at a restaurant. But they weren’t evidence that he was going to sit behind the desk and concoct Onion-like stories about the Iran nuclear talks. Williams’ lies were a failure of character or memory or both. The second fiction, connected to the first, is built into the evening news format itself: that a news anchor is reporting you the news, rather than reading it to you.