Broadcaster Brian Williams will return to the air Tuesday, easing into a far less prominent but familiar position of anchoring breaking news.
The former chief anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, fresh from his much-chronicled, six-month suspension for fabricating stories about his reporting tours, will anchor live breaking news, starting at 3 p.m. ET, on MSNBC for its coverage Pope Francis' visit to the U.S.
Having issued an apology and sat through an interview with an NBC colleague in June, the 56-year old is not expected to speak further on air about the controversy that led to his demotion from NBC to its sister cable network, both owned by Comcast. He will not participate in interviews with other reporters about his return.
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'sWorld 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."
This story appeared on USATODAY.com.
