1446 Bad Week for News

Bob Simon was one of those guys about whom the label “legendary” landed and stuck.  After covering wars on three continents, he died ingloriously on the battlefield of a New York City road.

David Carr was one of those reporters who covered guys like Simon.  His own war zone was a background in which the words “drug” and “booze” still emerged frequently, but whose insight and prose and investigative skills kept the rest of us more or less honest.

And then there’s Brian Williams.

Three guys gone missing in one of two ways.

Simon’s biography and his prowess have been well covered.  He was one of those correspondents who made CBS the “Tiffany network” at least for news.  And you can read anywhere about his exploits and the stupidity of his death as a passenger in a livery cab. Probably, you have already.

Carr was the media columnist for the New York Times.  He died “in the office” yesterday as the paper so delicately put it.  His work was a must read for those of us who navel gazed about ourselves, or work our colleagues and the trends -- really the tidal wave -- that the news business is dealing with nowadays.

And then there’s the now-suspended Williams, who brought honor and dishonor to NBC and osmotically to the rest of us lesser lights.

As for Williams, it’s time to let the scars heal before we resume the whipping. And let’s consider what the controversy really all about.

The short answer is money.

You have to ask, does NBC’s owner, Comcast, really care about the credibility of the fallen anchorman?  This also has a short answer: yes… money.

Not the estimated yearly ten to 13 million dollars they spend keeping him in good suits and a fancy midtown east apartment.  It’s the hundreds of millions the Nightly News program brings in.

Keep these facts in mind:

--The evening newscasts are on life support.

--The Williams version was the least likely to die until Brian was outed as a teller of tall tales.

--It is number one in a slow race largely because the ABC version is anchored by a kid whose main asset is that he’s a kid and the CBS version is so boring it puts you to sleep before 7 pm.

These once premier newscasts -- replacements for the afternoon and evening newspapers -- have descended into a television hell that tells you nothing you haven’t already heard on radio, read on the internet or don’t care about and shouldn’t unless you’re a big fan of missing puppies.

Think about it.  Huntley-Brinkley, Chancellor, Brokaw, Jennings and Cronkite used to sit you down for half an hour and tell you what you missed while you were busy all day.

But you don’t need them anymore.  You have CNN and Yahoo news.  And the Huffington Post and Drudge.

So the job of anchorman (or woman) now is more ring master than tour guide through the maze that is each day’s news.

People are comparing Williams’ six month unpaid suspension with the slow speed ousting of Dan Rather at CBS.  Not the same thing.  

First, Rather’s supposedly fake story might actually have been real, but he couldn’t prove it.  Second, Rather had his enemies within CBS and within the Washington establishment.  He got canned, but  wasn’t turned overnight into a national laughing stock.

Money.  Williams’ future hangs on what happens to ratings and revenue during his absence.

And the amateurs at Comcast need to learn how to run a newsroom.  So far, the lessons are lost on the company-wide news chief and her ineputy, the president of NBC News.

You can learn a lot about an anchor by looking at what he or she does during the off time.  Lester Holt is said to take refuge behind a Fender bass.  Cronkite took refuge on his sailboat.  Williams took refuge by appearing on Letterman and Saturday Night Live.

Then there’s Brokaw.  Here’s a story from a weekday afternoon in the third floor newsroom at 30 Rock.  

Brokaw has his coat on and is heading for the elevators.

The executive producer at the time, Jeff Gralnick (1939- 2011,) asked him where he was going.  The answer: to some local school where kids were waiting to talk with him.

Gralnick: “I want to send a camera crew along.  We can use that.”

Brokaw: “Nah.  That’s not what this is about.  This is about those kids.”

Heard it with my own ears from a distance of about one foot.

Guess we’re all going to have to turn to Jon Stewart for the news. Oh, wait… he’s calling it quits this year.

Well, there’s always Drudge and the Huff-post.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to it. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1443 Brian, We Hardly Knew Ya

When it comes to telling a good story, it’s hard to beat Brian Williams, anchor of the NBC Nightly News.

Unfortunately, sometimes the good stories are too good.  

Such was the case when he kept telling us over the last couple of years that when embedded with the troops in one or another of our random, pop-up wars, the helicopter in which he was riding took enemy fire. It didn’t.

The major network newscasts run 30 minutes, of which about 22 is actual content.  Williams took almost a minute of that time last Wednesday to explain and apologize when reporters for the Stars And Stripes and others called him on the latest telling.

Fifty seconds on the evening news is almost a lifetime.  Most “tell” stories -- news items without video -- take about 20 seconds.

The apology amounted to “it was tough to remember all the details 12 years after the fact… I made an honest mistake.”

Sure.

Earth to Brian:  You’re in an aircraft that takes fire, you don’t forget in 12 years or ever.  If you’re in an aircraft is trailing an aircraft that takes fire by almost an hour, you might have talked yourself into believing something different.

So, were you addled or just lying?

Williams is a pretty normal guy, or at least he was back in the day.  He had and still has excellent credentials, a fine background including a stint as White House correspondent.  

He’s a funny guy.  He’s good company. He was a volunteer fireman.  Like many of his age and older, he never finished college, but went on to go directly into the news business.  

Don’t pooh pooh that.  Neither Peter Jennings nor Walter Cronkite were college graduates. Brokaw took plenty of time off between starting and finishing college.  (And so did I.)

But when something like Brian On The Helicopter comes up, you have to wonder … okay, was this an isolated incident?  Or are there things we don’t know about.

Who is defending Williams?  Dan Rather, the single most overrated news anchor in the history of television.  Speaking from exile at AXS TV, the Ryan Seacrest-owned, scarcely watched cable channel, Rather told Politico Williams is an “honest decent man, an excellent reporter and anchor -- and a brave one.”

Well, that’s what we all thought. And when it comes to the question about isolated incident vs. something more, Williams is the kind of guy that makes us easy to hope for the first.

There are no sinister motives.  Banish that thought. But the anchor of one of the three major PM newscasts has one and only one asset: credibility.

And right now, that’s in question.

Shrapnel:

--NBC has new owners, Comcast, which appears to be completely clueless about how to run a network or its news division.  We said the same about GE when it bought NBC as part of RCA in 1985. GE learned a thing or two in its years of ownership, but whether Comcast will is in doubt.

--The Williams issue and the Comcast issue are not directly related.  But what the latter does about the former will be telling.  Do they ride this out or make changes on Nightly News, and if so… what will they be?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015