NBC turns guns on itself in Williams scandal
What are the chances Brian Williams returns to NBC Nightly News?
After this weekend, it’s not looking good. Scratch that. It’s looking real bad. The Littlest Hobo has a better chance of returning to TV. The odds are slightly better for Dan Rather to become a lead dancer with Chippendales.
But at this point, two months after Williams was suspended, four months before the suspension is to end — and amid new stories about how the ongoing internal investigation has uncovered at least 11 instances in which he allegedly “embellished” the truth — maybe we should be asking a different question.
How did NBC take a rotten situation and make it even more putrid?
I realize there is no step-by-step guide for network execs to consult when an anchor face plants into scandal. But since February, when the Stars and Stripes military paper broke the story that Williams was not aboard a U.S. army chopper in 2003 that came under attack during the Iraq War, as he later claimed, NBC has bungled this crisis at every imaginable turn.
Let me be clear on one point. I am not defending Williams. I already did that at the outset of this saga with a column that argued he deserved the benefit of the doubt until more was known. Maybe this was a false memory. Maybe he wanted to get out of the evening news and into late night comedy. After all, his bosses were well aware of his other love ever since he lobbied to replace Jay Leno, approached CBS about taking over for David Letterman and became a fixture on the late night circuit, guest hosting on Saturday Night Live and trading droll barbs with everyone from Jon Stewart to Jimmy Fallon.
So fast-forward two months and now we’re dealing with at least 11 incidents. Even my father emailed to sarcastically ask, “You still think he had a false memory?” No. OK? No. But something else is becoming more troubling than the sins of this besieged anchor: NBC is darkening its own future by showing utter contempt for a fallen star. Who would ever want to work at NBC after this?
Consider the recent reports, including pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times, in which unnamed insiders divulged partial details about the investigation. Did these partial details prove Williams is a serial liar? No, there is still much “uncertainty.” Does NBC believe he is prone to exaggeration? Perhaps. But they also know most of this alleged embellishing came in the retelling, long after the fact, and often when Williams was on the comedy circuit in “raconteur” mode.
This doesn’t mean he gets to hop away unscathed from the self-inflicted wreckage to his credibility. That may never happen. But the vile part of how NBC is handling and leaking — the news division appears to have more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese — is that Williams is not able to respond.
This is a condition of his unpaid suspension. The face of NBC News has been muzzled. He must sit in silence until his overlords decide his fate.
Instead of deciding, instead of firing him or negotiating a resignation or putting him back on the air, NBC has doubled down on doing nothing.
A culture of dysfunction has embraced inertia.
Maybe the network fears legal action. Maybe it knows Williams will be snapped up by a competitor seconds after he leaves. Maybe there is a financial motivation. After all, in advance of the upfront presentation for advertisers next week, media buyers already know Nightly News fell behind ABC’s World News Tonight With David Muir earlier this month.
It was the first time NBC lost a weekly ratings war since 2009. So why not tell advertisers: “Look, we’re investigating. Brian may still be back in August. As you know, viewers love second chances”?
Whatever the reason for letting this fester, the net result is NBC is now trying to have it both ways: covertly distancing itself from a PR catastrophe while officially dangling the possibility of a return that seems less possible with each passing day.
This is not an act of survival. It is asymmetric warfare.
It is character assassination under the guise of, “Well, he did this to himself.”
If NBC believes he must go, it should let him go.
Pointing a gun at his head indefinitely is only going to blow up in its face. vmenon@thestar.ca