TJ Walker breaks down NBC's six-month suspension of Brian Williams for fabricating a helicopter story. Williams lost public trust fast and had no loyal base to defend him, Walker says. He estimates just a 1% chance Williams returns as a network anchor.
Questions this video answers
Six months without pay.
About 1%.
From 23rd most trusted in America to "way up in the eight hundreds" (per Walker's comment).
Chapters
NBC news anchor Brian Williams is gone, at least for the next six months, but he's probably gone for good. So one week ago today the story came out that Brian Williams had fabricated his involvement in a helicopter that he claimed had been shot down in Iraq, but in fact was not shot down or shot at. Since then his entire career has unraveled. Last night NBC announced that it was suspending Williams for six months without pay. Now folks, you can murder people in this country get suspended and still get pay. So when you get suspended without pay, that really says management is looking for a way to get rid of you. Now when this story first broke, I actually gave praise to Brian Williams apology and said I think he'll be able to survive this with two possible exceptions. If he can get through this without these two things happening, he will be able to continue his anchor. The two things were number one, if any more revelations come out where people are really saying he lied about this. Now it turns out that people are saying he never saw a body float by in Katrina. Numerous other stories he's told and talk show appearances are now coming into question. The other factor I said that would get him eliminated is if ratings went down, which means a loss in millions of dollars for NBC. In fact, the ratings quickly went down. Mr. Williams own approval rating went from the 23rd most trusted person in all of America to way up in the eight hundreds behind the Duck Dynasty guy. So NBC can see which way this is going. They're trying to cut their losses. So they now as of last night suspended him for six months. Here's the problem. How do you bring Brian Williams back after six months? By that time the audience will presumably have gotten used to whether it's Lester Holt or some other anchor. Ratings will have stabilized and it's going to be pretty hard to see how bringing Brian Williams back will will cause a jump up in ratings. Other factors in play here, Brian Williams never tweeted, he was never active in social media. He was active on David Letterman and other areas. But unlike Anderson Williams and a lot of other host and news anchors, Brian Williams stayed above the fray. Well that's fine when everything is going well. But once you know what hit the fan, he didn't defend himself, he didn't answer his critics, he didn't answer the charges. And that allowed his enemies to eat him up alive. Other factors in play here, Brian Williams has no firm base of core support now he has people who like him. Nine million people watched him. But here's the difference. If a scandal like this were to hit Bill O'Reilly or any of the opinion anchors at MSNBC. Yeah, they might have a lot of people calling for them to be fired, but they would have this whole army of supporters, fervent believers who say, we want to stand up for our guy or woman. Brian Williams didn't have that. He had basically the worst of all possible worlds because there was an army of conservatives who just can't stand anyone in the mainstream media seeing this as an opportunity to get a scalp on the mantle. So he had the enemies out there of a partisan conflict, but he didn't have supporters. He didn't have an army of steadfast people lobbying NBC, hitting all the blogs, bombarding Twitter, saying, this guy's getting a raw deal, you have to save him. And that's one reason why support for him melted away. Prediction. After six months, he's not going to be anchoring the news on a regular basis unless NBC goes from number one to number three. They can't find anyone else and they try him out for a day or two and it goes back. So it's not incredibly insanely impossible. But I put that at about 1%. What happens to Brian Williams after that? You know, he could certainly do entertainment interviews on the Today show. Nobody would get offended by that, really. I do think that his days of $10 million a year salaries and being the number one poster boy for straight news and trusted news, those days are gone for Brian Williams. What does this mean for others? I think more and more anchors are going to be like Scott Paley of CBS News, which is show up, do your job, go home, don't do other talk shows, don't do stand up comedy, don't appear on sitcoms, have a low profile. If you are lucky enough to get a prime gig like anchoring a network newscast where you're making five, eight, $10 million a year, you're gonna have to be happy with just that. And I think a lot of people would be. So that would mean basically no speeches, anything you say in a speech. Now if you're a news anchor, you have to assume people are going to go through a fine tooth comb and want to fact check everything. Therefore you can't tell any stories because someone can always say, well, that's not exactly how it happened. So that's one prediction. People in extraordinarily high profile positions, unless their politicians aren't going to give speeches anymore and they're going to do a lot fewer talk show appearances. That's my assessment. Check back here in six months. How do you feel. Post your comments.
