They call them anchors for a reason: They settle a news program and center it as they try to make sense of the world’s events all around them by handing off reports to correspondents.
In the case of actual network news anchors, the skill set not only includes accuracy, but also deep judgment, careful considerations — often you are the national hand-holder and consoler-in-chief in the nation’s biggest tragedies; one also shares in its greatest triumphs. Walter Cronkite shed a tear when JFK was killed, but he also did so when men landed on the moon. Just as importantly, he didn’t tear up when he had to look his viewers in the eye and say, after witnessing what was going on in the Vietnam War, he could see no prospects for success.
Anchors also have to be able to talk and talk endlessly if needed, even if there was nothing new to report. Just to be there and continue repeating what is known is comfort enough. And if those long rambles — enlightening if they were from, say, Peter Jennings; excruciating if from Wolf Blitzer (for whom everything is emphatic, yet he provides the wrong mid-phrase pause for every sentence) — must be rooted in truth.
No anchor was better prepared for his job than Brian Williams, who was sent out in the field on pre-opinion show MSNBC for years before smoothly making the transition from Tom Brokaw. But if we can’t believe him when he’s in the middle of one of those lengthy, stream-of-conciousness addresses amid a live news crisis, the game is over. When he starts embellishing details of past reporting that narcissistically and unnecessarily put him closer to the action than he really was, he has to be quickly ushered away from his anchor chair. He can still be a reporter, or someone giving the occasional special report. But not an anchor any more.
When he tried to speedily admit to embellishing a wartime report during a newscast last week, Williams hoped that by bringing it up first, for many people, and admitting wrong, that people would forgive him as quickly as they did when David Letterman astonishingly admitted one night he had an affair with a younger staffer. But being a news anchor is different than being a late night comedian and host, where the immediate effect would be in toning down the Monica Lewinsky-type material, should it come around.
NBC seemed to agree with the newsman’s plan, though, letting Williams go on with the news. It was only after some online outrage — and honestly, the kind of feigned history Zelig gags that will simply never stop — that at first, he’d be off the air for an undisclosed time, allowing for an in-house investigation. Even then, other stories, real or exaggerated, began piling up against him, from seeing floating bodies in Katrina to overstating the number of rescued puppies (it got to be kind of ridiculous: Next up would be his wife saying he took out the trash, but he didn’t, etc).
Then suddenly, the sentence came down Tuesday night: A six-month suspension without pay.
This won’t stop the distrust of Williams as a newsman. People won’t forget. And the reputation will only intensify should he return to the chair in six months (alongside inevitable headlines of: Brian is back! Will he be more truthful this time?). NBC is in a bind. After carefully preparing Williams for the anchorship, they’ve really got nobody to step up.
There’s Lester Holt, who will fill in the spot for now. But really, I remember the number of UFO specials he did for NBC Universal cable stations. To tie in with the Syfy network show “Warehouse 13” he reported a special called “Inside Secret Government Warehouses: Shocking Revelations.” It’s not the stuff of Sevareid.
That MSNBC has moved largely to opinion personalities means that none of its roster is poised to take over, much as I’d love to watch a Rachel Maddow-hosted newscast or even one by Alex Wagner. NBC has a problem in finding an anchor who’d not only be the host of the evening broadcast but be the face of the network in the event of huge news. And it need not have happened if someone had button-holed Williams earlier and let him know, after, say, his declaration on Letterman of his war heroics, that maybe he should tone down this story that didn’t really square with what had happened. They weren’t carefully watching their own man.
As a result, Brian Williams not only slow-jammed his career; he slow-jammed the network.
It was Jon Stewart Monday who took an interesting tack on the story — Williams, after all had been a frequent guest and occasional foil on “The Daily Show.” Why, Stewart’s report suggested, are people so upset with Williams messing with the truth during wartime when they weren’t so concerned that leaders at the time were lying all along — and got us into the war in the first place?
It was a typically thoughtful take on the story — and not just because Williams might have been a friend (Stewart had famously had to cut ties with poor Anthony Weiner — his onetime college roommate — after that infamous political flameout). And that’s why it will be with some pain that Stewart picked Tuesday night, too, to announce his own departure from “The Daily Show” later this year after more than 16 years on the job.
In that time, he almost singlehandedly sharpened political satire to its knife edge (a field previously left to “SNL” skits and Leno jokes), becoming so smart and accurate especially in putting political declarations in context (with marvelous contradictory tapes from the past) that “The Daily Show” in many ways became the newscast of choice of young people sick of the lies on mainstream networks (not just fibs the anchors would come up with, but more those they’d blithely pass along from government press releases).
Under Stewart, “The Daily Show” created stars the way “SNL” used to, with Steve Carell, Ed Helms, John Oliver and Stephen Colbert all going on to bigger things. The height of his political power was seen when Stewart and Colbert held a rally at the Mall in D.C. and an inauguration-sized audience came out. Stewart didn’t abuse this power; he always maintained his job was to deliver jokes, and he did.
More than that, he was about the most urbane interviewer in late night, a field that had turned to bar games and dim gags on the networks. Stewart would read the books of the authors he’d bring on; he’d hold his own with ambassadors and presidential candidates. Still, after he took a summer off to direct a movie, he wasn’t quite the same when he got back and it showed. As Colbert ramped up his final slate of shows in preparation of taking over Letterman’s “Late Show” this fall, Stewart often faltered, or more often gave the less funny show. And he was smart enough to see it.
“This show doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host, and neither than you,” he told his surprised audience at the end of Tuesday’s show, telling them something (in the early evening taping) that the home audience would have already heard in news reports and social media by 11 p.m. Even then, Stewart was true to the humor: Leaving the farewell announcement to the end of the show, lest it overshadow the comedy on the outset of the show, or the interview in between.
“Seventeen years is the longest the ever in my life held a job,” he said in the show. “In my heart, I know it’s time for someone else to have that opportunity.”
Finding a replacement for Stewart would at first seem harder than finding one for Williams. And yet, few expected Larry Wilmore’s show that replaced “The Colbert Report” to be as vital and funny and fully-realised as it quickly became in its first weeks this year. Perhaps the writers and producers will be able to bolster a new face at that desk.
Just not Williams.