Why the Brian Williams Decision Is a Win-Win for Williams and MSNBC
The news that Brian Williams will be returning to NBC not as Nightly News anchor (Lester Holt will remain there) but as part of MSNBC is good news for both Williams and the ratings-challenged MSNBC. From an MSNBC perch, Williams can build the kind of newscast he used to say he wanted Rock Center to be: filled with hard news yet also making room for the kind of cultural coverage at which Williams excels whenever he appears on a talk show.
Indeed, here’s what I expect to happen when this all shakes down: Williams does an MSNBC hour at either 8 or 10 p.m., and then hosts a late-night show at 11 p.m., where he’ll be able to deploy the show-biz skills he wanted to use when he threw his hat into the ring to replace David Letterman.
Sound unlikely? Only if you’re still encumbered by the question of whether we should “trust” Brian Williams again after his history of fabricated anecdotes. Look, the idea of the inviolate trust in a news anchor is a holdover from the myth that accrued around Walter Cronkite — it was a burden even Cronkite didn’t want. The notion that a news anchor is much more than just a news-reader (which is what anchors are more accurately called in Europe) is simply foolish.
Reporters report hard facts. News anchors read distillations of reporting done by others. Williams never lied on the Nightly News about important news stories that had been reported by others; he embellished, exaggerated, stories about his own stunts as a dashing news anchor on assignment, the kind of assignments that don’t uncover news or scoops or breakthroughs.
Related: It’s Official: Brian Williams Will Remain at NBC News
As for the idea that this is a precipitous fall for Williams — that’s 20th-century thinking about status in the TV news business. To my mind, the only question now is scheduling. Do Williams’s bosses want to put him up against Bill O’Reilly at 8 p.m.? It would seem that Williams’s status demands he be given the first primetime hour, and God knows Chris Hayes’s All In is a complete ratings failure. But there’s no chance Williams will put a dent in The O’Reilly Factor. Why risk slowing the momentum Williams will have when he returns to TV right from the start?
I don’t know what MSNBC’s solution is for 8 p.m., but Williams should oust Lawrence O’Donnell from 10 p.m., follow Rachel Maddow’s show (and thus avoid Williams competing with Fox’s other powerhouse, The Kelly File), and take up residence at 10, where he really could do some damage to the weaker-in-every-sense Hannity. Then, as I said, Williams should start dreaming up his ideal version of a late-night show to follow his primetime broadcast. In the best version, it could combine the conversation of The Charlie Rose Show with the jokiness of Letterman and add something new — namely, Brian Williams, an entertaining smart guy — to the cable-news mix.
