Brian Williams to Stay at NBC, but Not as News Anchor
By EMILY STEEL, JOHN KOBLIN and RAVI SOMAIYAJUNE 17, 2015
NBC is planning to announce on Thursday that Brian Williams will not return to his position as the anchor of its “Nightly News” show, four months after the network suspended him for exaggerating his experiences during a helicopter attack in Iraq, according to two people briefed on the decision.
Mr. Williams is expected to move to a new role at NBC News, primarily at the cable news network MSNBC, which would probably be in a breaking-news capacity at the beginning, according to one of the people.
Lester Holt, who has been filling in for Mr. Williams as anchor, will permanently assume the position as anchor of NBC’s evening newscast, one person said. Mr. Holt was previously the anchor of NBC’s weekend evening news broadcasts.
The people who spoke about NBC’s decision insisted on anonymity because the discussions were private and the decision had not yet been announced.
NBC representatives could not be reached for comment. Mr. Williams’s lawyer, Robert Barnett, declined to comment.
News of NBC’s decision was first reported by CNN.com.
Exactly what Mr. Williams’s new role at NBC entails is not clear. But revitalizing MSNBC, which has suffered sharp ratings declines, is known to be a priority of Andrew Lack, the former president of NBC News who was brought back in March to head the division. With the evening news anchor decision out of the way, Mr. Lack is expected to focus a good portion of his attention on fixing MSNBC, and in the coming months, the cable network is expected to introduce more hard news and more reporting from NBC News talent during daytime hours, according to a person briefed on the plans. That would be something of a break from its more opinion-based programming.
The new role can be viewed as a humbling comedown for Mr. Williams, who before the controversy was one of the country’s most prominent and respected broadcast journalists. One point of contention during the negotiations over his new role at the network was the extent to which Mr. Williams would apologize for the controversy, according to a television executive who discussed the issue with people at NBC.
Mr. Williams, 56, was riding high as the No. 1 nightly news anchor, drawing close to 10 million viewers a night. His popularity extended beyond the anchor’s chair; his quick wit and engaging manner made him a coveted speaker at dinners and panels and a frequent celebrity guest on entertainment shows.
But on his newscast on Feb. 4, Mr. Williams admitted that he had embellished his account of being on a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire in 2003 and apologized to viewers. The response put him and NBC on the defensive; military veterans took him to task, and media commentators and viewers claimed he had lost the trust so critical to a network news anchor.
On Feb. 10, Mr. Williams was suspended for six months without pay.
The controversy escalated to the top of the corporation, with Stephen B. Burke, NBCUniversal’s chief executive, playing a crucial role in deciding Mr. Williams’s fate, according to people with knowledge of those deliberations. Also closely involved was Mr. Lack, who was president of NBC News from 1993 to 2001. Mr. Lack is known to be close to Mr. Williams, and his hiring was viewed as a signal that NBC was trying to figure out a way to keep Mr. Williams at the network in some capacity.
Almost immediately after the controversy erupted, NBC opened an investigation into Mr. Williams, led by Richard Esposito, the senior executive producer for investigations. Over the last several months it uncovered 10 to 12 instances in which he was thought to have exaggerated or fabricated accounts of his reporting, according to people familiar with the inquiry. Mr. Esposito declined to comment Wednesday night.
The investigation was conducted in an almost legalistic fashion, said one person familiar with the process, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the inquiry. There was one work room that had printouts on the walls of online pictures spoofing Mr. Williams and his purported tall tales, the person said, but over all the investigation was rigorous and detailed. It generated hundreds of pages of material, based partly on interviews with Mr. Williams’s colleagues inside NBC who had firsthand knowledge of his reporting.
Television industry executives said that it would have been difficult for Mr. Williams to return to the anchor chair because he had lost the trust not only of viewers but also the people in NBC’s newsroom. And, in fact, some of Mr. Williams’s colleagues had brought suspicious instances of reporting by Mr. Williams to the attention of investigators and had provided them with information. It is not clear whether Mr. Williams is aware of the investigation’s contents.
A person close to Mr. Williams who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private, said his supporters saw the decision as, if not quite an exoneration, a signal that any wrongdoing investigated by NBC was not so egregious as to prevent a return. When the scandal first emerged, many media executives inside and outside the company had thought it was untenable for him to remain with the company.
Industry executives said the decision most likely involved more than journalistic ethics, with hundreds of millions of advertising dollars at stake. NBC News is in a fierce competition with rival news groups for ratings, which affects how advertisers allocate their dollars. NBC generated $200 million in ad sales for its evening news broadcast in 2013, according to Kantar Media.
Finding an appropriate role for Mr. Williams at NBC posed a challenge, television executives said. Mr. Williams built a reputation as a master storyteller and news reader but was not known for his interviewing skills. In moving to MSNBC, he is returning to the network where he broke out with his own show in the mid-1990s, when he was groomed on the new cable network to someday succeed Tom Brokaw as the “Nightly News” anchor, which he did in 2004.
Television executives said that NBC would stand to benefit by keeping Mr. Williams from going to a competitor and talking publicly about the controversy. One added that the new post could be considered a trial period, and that if Mr. Williams won back the trust of the newsroom and viewers, he could eventually return to a more prominent position at NBC.
Mr. Williams’s departure from the anchor chair left NBC in an awkward position for its national newscast. He had recently signed a five-year contract worth $50 million, and the network was not anticipating having to replace him so soon. No one in the news ranks was being prepared to succeed him.
But since the start of the suspension, Mr. Holt has mostly held steady in the ratings, and the network has been neck and neck in the race for viewers with ABC’s evening national newscast.
The crisis surrounding Mr. Williams’s embellishments was another blow for an NBC News division dealing with problems on several fronts. In the past year, it has shaken up its senior management ranks, replaced David Gregory as the host of “Meet the Press” and fired an executive hired to oversee the “Today” show after only 10 weeks. Those will be issues Mr. Lack will address, along with MSNBC, now that the decision on Mr. Williams’s role has been made.
Correction: June 17, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated Mr. Williams’s age. He is 56, not 55.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/business/nbc-plans-to-let-brian-williams-stay-but-not-as-news-anchor.html?_r=0
