Is It Anchor Away for Williams?

As The Georgetowner goes to press, NBC News anchor Brian Williams is meeting with network executives to determine his future.

The scandal/crisis/firestorm that has enveloped Williams like an ever more ill-fitting flak jacket tells us a lot about the arena of today’s media world – from the diminishing importance of television news to the almost savage, DEFCON-level capability of social media’s thumbs up/thumbs down response.

To sum up: Williams, who has been the hugely popular, square-jawed “face” of NBC News for ten years, recently, in trying to honor an Iraq veteran for his service, recalled an incident in which he was covering the war himself on board a helicopter. He said the copter was shot at and forced down.

His account quickly went up for grabs after some veterans questioned the story. Social media and traditional media, both print and television, lambasted Williams, who apologized on air. Williams said that he had somehow “conflated” different memories and stories – putting the word right up there with “spin,” “triangulate,” “I made a mistake,” “mis-spoke” and “parse” as less bold and damaging words than “I lied” or “I made up a story.”

Only a few days later, the buzz was that Williams, who once schmoozed with Letterman and Fallon and was making $13 million a year, might be on his way out.

NBC higher-ups, while backing him, also launched an independent investigation of past Williams comments on other stories, including Katrina, and encounters with Hezbollah. Worse for Williams, the Twitterverse was starting to make fun of him, even putting him Zelig-like into all sorts of scenarios, including punching out Saddam Hussein in a diner.

By Sunday, Williams had decided to take himself off the newscast “for several days,” saying, “Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.”

Anchors are presented as men and women in positions of trust, but they’ve become much more (and less) than that. They’ve become celebrities themselves. Television news isn’t what it used to be either. News today is, for better or worse, packaged like entertainment.

NBC News is one of the most self-referencing and self-reverential institutions around, perhaps more than any other news entity. Its cross-pollinization and marketing – with the “Nightly News” touting local news, touting the “Today Show,” touting “Meet the Press” and vice versa – are hard to escape.

How bad does this sort of thing get? Not long ago, a “Nightly News” segment hyped the live NBC production of “Peter Plan” that starred Alison Williams, the anchor’s daughter.

Perhaps we should blame ourselves for investing this kind of trust in people who in the end only read the news (stylishly). But Williams, in this instance, didn’t botch reading the news. He told stories about himself, in hot pursuit of the news, that plainly didn’t happen the way he told them.

I guess we should advise readers to, well, stay tuned.