NBC’s Lester Holt sat in for embattled “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams on Monday night and took a few moments to address his colleague’s absence.
“We want to take just a moment to tell you where Brian is tonight,” Holt said. “In a message to his colleagues over the weekend, Brian told us he’s taking several days off this broadcast amid questions over how he recalls certain stories he covered. In a career spent covering the news, Brian told us it’s clear he’s become too much a part of the news. He’ll be off while this issue is dealt with.”
Holt’s statement, which was a rehashing of the “personal note” Williams posted on NBCNews.com over the weekend announcing his decision to take some time off, didn’t indicate when the longtime anchor would return to the broadcast.
NBC reportedly assigned its own investigative team to look into Williams’ story about being in a helicopter hit by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003, as well as some of the tales he’s told over the years about his time reporting on Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Watch below via NBC News:
Had Brian reported on yellow cake uranium, aluminum tubes, and black men raping babies in the superdome it would be acceptable.
As the 1990s were ending the 6 mega corporate owners of all American media were ‘synergizing’ by making massive cuts in staffing, driving the final nails in union coffins and developing the means to slide commercial content into formerly cash-draining newscasts.
As Clintonian deregulation proceeded and Campaign Dubya began to form, the few remaining anchormen from the glory days and their younger replacements were presented with a journalistic dilemma, accept massive salary increases, add some minor duties once covered by union contracts and stay mum about the staffing cuts and the intrusion of commercial content. All, to my knowledge, accepted the cash and stayed quiet as staff were dumped onto the streets and TV news became a very different animal…
I take it you were in the business. That’s the way it happened: in the early '80’s there were about 50 companies determining what we read, watch, listen to (TV/radio/film/news). Today, there are just 6 gatekeepers, a media oligopoly so to say, dominating the top 10 + media markets. I think it was Reagan who rolled back the Fairness Doctrine. The rest is history. Product placement is movies is one thing but sliding commercial content into a newscast is kind o f bizarre. It’s even defended.
I think Williams recently signed a new 10 million $ contract. Could get ugly. Remember when he would call Imus and talk about a NASCAR event he and his son had been to. Always glib and affable, good looking, and writing about his new Porsche in GQ, An infomation rock star no doubt. Let’s hope he never makes it back.
Reagan in 1986 with fellow Rethugs and FCC Chairman Mark Fowler eliminated the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Provisions of the Federal Communication Act which allowed programs like Sally Jesse Raphael, Donahue, Rush and Howard Stern to be classified as newscasts and freed from certain restrictions on potentially libelous speech. Clinton finished nailing the dereg coffin shut in the late 90s amid swirls of cash and the slow disappearance of actual journalism from the airwaves and cables.