NBC Nightly News anchor exudes aura of calm
NEW YORK — Watching a White House briefing in his office, Lester Holt said he had to walk away when exasperated reporter Brian Karem recently confronted Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the Trump administration’s hostility toward the press. Their exchange almost made him physically ill.
Holt’s no fan of press bashing, but fighting back that way is decidedly not his style.
“I understand his frustration, but I thought that we just can’t be trapped into that sort of thing,” the NBC Nightly News anchor said. “We can take the hits.”
Holt, 58, exudes an aura of calm on the set, so much so that it’s surprising to hear him talk candidly about how tough it was to replace Brian Williams as NBC News’ chief anchor. Two years removed from that drama, he’s in a tight battle for supremacy with ABC’s David Muir for viewers and advertising dollars in the dinner hour.
There were moments after replacing Williams, Holt conceded, “when I thought, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ ”
To rewind, Holt was elevated after Williams was found to have misrepresented his role in covering some news stories. Holt filled in during a limbo period when Williams was suspended, earning the role permanently when it was decided in June 2015 that Williams would not return to the job.
His first challenge was sifting through all manner of advice.
“It was all of this ‘make it your own’ and ‘you’re the guy at the helm’ and ‘act like you own it,’ ” he recalled. “That’s easy for people to say. But under the circumstances, you’re inheriting a successful broadcast, you’re working with a staff that has taken an emotional hit and there’s this whole confidence thing. I’ve always been confident in my abilities, but this was an extraordinary challenge. All these things were coming together and, oh, by the way, you want to maintain the ratings. I’d never been under that kind of pressure before.”
Since Williams was the same age and had been atop the ratings for a decade, Holt had reasoned that he’d hit his career ceiling as the anchor of Today and Nightly News on the weekends, along with Dateline NBC.
“I don’t want to say that in a bitter way, it was just, this is probably as far as I’m going to go, and this isn’t half-bad,” he said. “There was no sense of regret. I had stopped on the rung of the ladder I was on and was enjoying the view.”
Most people at NBC felt Holt was a decent, thoughtful man and were rooting for him, said veteran television producer Tom Bettag, who was working at NBC with Ted Koppel at the time. That helped the staff navigate a painful time, he said.
“I was fearful that I would not be accepted,” Holt said, “that I had to earn my right to sit there and put my foot down and say no, we need to do the story this way or I don’t feel comfortable with that. For a long time, I think I was a bit more passive than I should have been.”
The feeling that Nightly News was now his show crept up on him. “I can’t even tell you what day it happened,” he said.
Holt loves to take the show out of the studio and has made those journeys his Nightly News signature. He’s travelled to South Korea, Israel and England so far this year, along with multiple trips within the U.S.
“Lester likes that human contact at the root level, in the trenches,” said NBC News chairman Andy Lack. “He can interview presidents and kings — he knows that comes with the territory and there’s news to be made — but what really gets his blood flowing is the travel to places where people’s lives are on the line.”