Post-Imus Fallout? NBC News Promotes NABJ Member to Vice President

In the wake of NBC's and MSNBC's embarrassment over the firing of Don Imus for his racial insensitivity to black women on the Rutgers basketball team, NBC News promoted Lyne Pitts, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), to be vice president of NBC News. Mrs. Pitts, the wife of CBS correspondent Byron Pitts, has ascended rapidly since she arrived to produce the Weekend Today programs in February 2006.

It's not hard to imagine this has a lot to do with assuaging the roiling internal rage over Imus that boiled over in that meeting NBC News President Steve Capus had with Al Roker and the gang before Imus was canned. Don't miss this sentence in her job description: "She also serves as the division's point person on diversity issues."

When Byron Pitts was chosen as 2002 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, he said he met his wife at the 1997 NABJ convention in Chicago.

Mrs. Pitts worked as senior broadcast producer on the CBS Evening News from July of 2003 to some time in 2004, but her name doesn't seem to surface in connection with Dan Rather's implosion over the phony memos about President Bush's military service.