TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

NBC's brian williams has been placed on leave. So, folks, we're now into a new week regarding the Brian Williams controversy. For those of you who missed it, he fabricated a story about being shot down in a helicopter a dozen years ago in the Middle east and it has come back to haunt him. And there are many clamoring for his firing. Now, what happened on Friday, or I guess it was Saturday, he was placed on leave. It's indefinite. It's frankly a bit fuzzy. Now. Here's why this is bad news for Brian Williams. The big advantage most media celebrities, TV personalities have when a crisis hits is that they're still in the media every day. They can essentially drown out negative coverage. I've seen this time after time. Look at Dr. Oz, look at John McLaughlin, Montel Williams. All of them have had big time scandals swirling around them, yet they stayed on the air and they just sort of drowned out their critics. Well, now that Brian Williams is off the air, he's also canceling, whether it was his idea or he was being forced to cancel his appearances on David Letterman. So he's now created an information vacuum. His side isn't getting out and his critics have the playing field to themselves. That's going to allow them to define him in purely negative ways. Here's my prediction. If the suspension ends, he goes back on the air. NBC puts out a statement saying, while we're unhappy that Brian Williams got this story wrong, we still have faith in him. We don't think he did anything important that was wrong on his newscast and he's still a good newsman then a lot of people are still going to be upset about this for years, but he'll continue to be able to anchor the news. But if this suspension goes on for two weeks, what's going to happen is the critics, those anti Brian Williams and anti network news itself will get stronger and stronger and stronger. The drumbeat will grow. And at that point, I think it's likely we won't see Brian Williams back on NBC News. So why am I talking about this? Why are people concerned about it? Let's face it, most people don't watch network news. I don't watch network news anymore. Back from the heyday when a third of the country watched it every night. Now it's down to 9 million out of 315 million people. So yeah, that's bigger than cable. It still does have some cache. But nothing of what I've said is because I'm a Brian Williams fan or an NBC News fan. I don't particularly like NBC News, not because of any ideological bias, but frankly, because it seems like an old boys club. It seems like the Skull and Bones club. When you look at all the children of famous people who get fat contracts there, whether it's the Bush daughter, the Clinton daughter, Tim Russert's son. It just seems a bit too incestuous to me. Mia Farrow's son. There's so many people at MSNBC and NBC who are just part of an insider's clique that I find a bit of a turnoff. Anyway, we'll be continuing our coverage of the Brian Williams controversy because I do think it's an interesting case study of crisis communications. If you have crisis communications needs, give us a call here at MediatrainingWorldwide 212-764-4955.