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It now just seems a matter of time — agonizing, humiliating time for NBC News anchor Brian Willliams. FTV Live sites sources as saying he could step down as eaerly as next week — but that’s at this point unconfirmed. If you read the reports coming out, and see the incredible Internet mockery NBC anchor Brian Williams is enduring due to his admission that he “misremembered” being on a helicopter shot down in Iraq, you have to draw one conclusion: it may happen in a week, may happen in a month but it’s buh-bye Brian to the NBC anchor’s slot and being the high profile brand of NBC News. The latest arrow-pointing straw in the wind: he has cancelled his slated appearance on CBS’s David Letterman’s show, where some reports said he had hoped to start to defuse the controversy:
Brian Williams is backing out of his scheduled appearance on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman,” citing the uncertainty about when he’ll be back at his anchor desk.
The “NBC Nightly News” anchor is at the center of a growing scandal over his inaccurate recounting of an Iraq War mission in 2003. He said on Saturday that he would take a hiatus from the evening news “for the next several days.”
But until Sunday afternoon he was still scheduled to show up for his date with Letterman on Thursday.
The sudden change reflects the chaotic situation behind the scenes at NBC News and among Williams’ representatives.
On Sunday morning, a spokeswoman for the “Late Show” said there had been no change to the plans for Williams to appear on Letterman’s show.
Around the same time, a source close to Williams said it was “undecided” if Williams would still appear, saying the network hadn’t considered the question yet.
Later in the day, the same source said the appearance was off. Williams has no other television appearances on the books.
Williams could well have decided to cancel on his own, or he may have gotten some advice from someone at NBC. And, then again, in a way the Letterman show was a bad place for him to be since Letterman was sure to zero in on the controversy:
In 2013, Letterman’s show was one of the venues where Williams gave an account of the Iraq mission that has been contradicted by the soldiers who were present.
“Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire including the one I was in — RPG and AK-47,” Williams told Letterman.
“No kidding!” Letterman responded.According to the soldiers’ accounts, Williams was on a different helicopter that did not come under fire.
None of this — the admission, the “old” media reaction, the “new media” reaction (the Huffington Post’s headline is “LYIN’ BRIAN GOES INTO HIDIN'”) the reaction on Twitter and his cancellation points to him keeping his anchor’s seat. He is damaged good and it’s just a matter of time before the damaged goods is taken off the shelt and replaced by something that does not seem past its expiration date.
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.