All of NBC’s bleeding-heart coverage of tattered American race relations – including the racial struggles of Michelle Obama – might sound awfully tinny if they don’t keep black anchorman Lester Holt in the Nightly News anchor chair.
In a new Brian Williams story at the Daily Beast, “a prominent black broadcast journalist who knows Holt” told them: “If Brian does not come back and Lester does not get the job, it’s going to get ugly. You can only imagine.”
It would seem odd for them to exile Williams and then turn to Savannah Guthrie or someone else other than Holt, but it’s interesting to note that turn might cause a racial rift.
In the new Beast piece, unnamed Williams critics are still venting:
“What if there’s a story about a presidential candidate who lied or embellished his resume?” said an NBC News veteran who, because of the sensitivity of the subject, spoke on condition of anonymity. “How do you have Brian Williams in that chair, intro-ing that story, without all of America guffawing?”
A second NBC News veteran expressed concern that the 55-year-old Williams—judging by quotes in various news stories attributed to “friends” of the anchor—might not fully grasp the gravity of his mistakes.
Indeed, Newsday’s well-connected television columnist Verne Gay recently reported that Williams was “almost certainly expecting a return to the anchor chair by this summer, his period of penance behind him...I hear he thinks a lot of the background noise is confined to the ‘industry’ or to the press, and that the rest of the world could not care less about what’s happened.”
While Williams’s attorney, Robert Barnett, “is fighting tooth and nail to get him his job back”—not negotiating a partial payout of Williams’s reported $50 million 5-year contract, according to an NBC News veteran—the anchor is likely not hearing what he needs to hear.
“It’s a tricky area,” this person said. “Sometimes a hired gun will tell you what you want to hear. If Brian’s goal is a comeback, the hired gun’s goal is a comeback. They say, ‘it won’t be pretty, but we can fix this, we can make this happen.’ They’re not going to say, ‘Look, buddy, you have got to get a grip on reality. You are gonna continue to be tabloid fodder, and if you think you’ve had it bad so far, your return to NBC is gonna be a total s--t show.’”
That last quote on “reality” was highlighed by the Daily Beast.
