'Greed Is Good' Voice Now Introduces NBC Nightly News

As Eat the Press has reported, NBC Nightly News has a famous new voice pitching Brian Williams at the program's introduction every night. It’s the actor Michael Douglas, best known as Aaron Sorkin’s liberal "American President" and as the evil Gordon Gekko character in the Oliver Stone Decade of Greed movie "Wall Street."

Douglas announces: "From NBC News world headquarters in New York, this is NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams."

Video (0:46): Windows Media (1.46 MB) or MP3 audio (360 kB).

It seemed a little under modulated on Debut Night, or maybe it just doesn’t match up to the James Earl Jones "This....is CNN" sonorous standard. But it’s easy to remember how much all the networks loved the Gordon Gekko line to sum up those greed-head Ronald Reagan 1980s, as we wrote in our newsletter at the time:

"Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good," pronounced actor Michael Douglas as capitalist caricature "Gordon Gekko" in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street. Piecing the "Decade of Greed" together in a desperate frenzy of imitation, the networks liked Gekko's image so much that CBS used it four times, and ABC and NBC showed it twice in their end-of-the-decade reviews...

On the December 26 ABC special co-produced with Time, Images of the '80s, Peter Jennings did admit the U.S. experienced "the longest and most sustained boom in the nation's history." He immediately followed with the obligatory Gekko clip and finished the sentence: "But it didn't always trickle down as they said it would."