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If Brian Williams was taken off his job for six months it would really be a de facto booting off the NBC News anchor slot. He’d be too much damaged goods to go back to that job. And suspended he is — without pay:
It’s anchors away — for six months.
NBC brass slapped anchorman Brian Williams with a lengthy six-month suspension Tuesday night.
“The suspension will be without pay and is effective immediately,” NBC News honcho Deborah Turness said in a memo to staffers. “We let Brian know of our decision earlier today.”
Lester Holt will continue to substitute anchor the “Nightly News” while Williams is in the penalty box.
Williams came under heavy fire for exaggerating his experience while covering the Iraq War in 2003. For 12 years he has claimed to have been riding in a military helicopter that was hit with an enemy rocket-propelled grenade. Military crew members who were there have come forward to say he was not — which has thrown a shadow over much of his past reporting.
Over the weekend, NBC launched an internal investigation, led by Richard Esposito, a former investigative reporter for ABC News, who is now the executive producer in charge of NBC’s investigative unit.
No matter how this is spun, there’s a 99.9999 percent chance he is g-o-n-e. Or is it 99.99999999 percent?
I can see his return now: “As I was saying six months ago. Really, let’s put this in the past. Let sleeping dogs lie — no, no! I mean…”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.