NBC can't say goodbye to Brian Williams.

The "WE CAN'T LET HIM GO TO ANOTHER NETWORK" style of crisis management engaged in by NBC has erupted again with regards to exaggeration-prone former NIGHTLY NEWS anchor Brian Williams.

From a NEW YORK TIMES article http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/business/nbc-plans-to-let-brian-williams-stay-but-not-as-news-anchor.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
In February, Mr. Williams ranked as the 23rd-most-trusted person in the country, on par with Denzel Washington, Warren E. Buffett and Robin Roberts. By May, his trust ranking had plummeted to 3,352, near the rapper Eminem and the Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner, according to the Marketing Arm, a research firm whose celebrity index is closely watched by media and marketing executives.

The best summary I've read of Brian Williams-as-Anchorman-In-War.

The really dumb, pitiable thing about Brian Williams’ circumstance today is that he felt he had to do it at all – that his maleness or reportage or patriotism would be enhanced by it. But death doesn’t need a punch-up or rewrite. Nearly 20 years ago, I stood outside a club in New Haven, Connecticut, and some argument resulted in a bunch of handgun fire, and I dove in full chickenshit mode behind a car. It would be infinitely sexier to claim that someone standing next to me took a bullet. (They didn’t.) It would be sexier still to claim that I was in the coffeehouse a block away that got shot-up in retribution. (I wasn’t; I’d left it five minutes before.) But all of that is scary stuff without elaboration.

Being shot near is abnormal enough to hold people’s attention; it’s sad that Brian Williams seemed to think he wasn’t taking a brave enough risk by merely flying over one of the most dangerous cities in the world, in the same kind of vehicle that had been shot down merely an hour before. That he felt he needed to claim to be in that other vehicle and “incapable” of remembering whether it was struck with a goddamn rocket is just dumb as hell.

But what’s especially silly – and what will make his firing sillier still – is that he felt a kind of duty to “authenticity” to zero the distance between himself and the troops. In the very climate that he and other media members helped foster (the one in which all soldiers are heroes by default), the solemnity of his war reporting comes with the prerequisite that he seem, at least in one or two telegenic moments, indivisible from the heroes around him.

Maybe it speaks to some defect in Brian Williams’ character that he felt he needed to be a character as much as a reporter – like his sideshow gigs of being the Disembodied Head of Brian Williams on the TV wall behind Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, or being yet another mega-Springsteen fan journalist, or being a nine-time recurring guest gig on 30 Rock as himself. Given all of that, maybe Brian Williams putting on fatigues was just another form of dress-up and being liked.

There was another option for him – there always was – but, depending on how you define the word, it was always a lot more dangerous. Brian Williams could have renounced feel-good features on the “regular joes” feeding a war machine revved up on lies and focused instead on the lies endangering them. He could have reported more on non-heroes – both the desk bound creators of the war or the volunteers of questionable stability who make the Hadithas every time. Or he could have reported on heroes who worked as contractors for the American occupation and were left behind in a radicalized nation without Uncle Sam’s backing or, even better, on the black-books contractor class that took US payouts and did their jobs with minimal inconvenience and maximal collateral damage.

All of that is less fun and more threatening to one’s contract than a sexed-up trip in a whirlybird in a warzone, but it’s reporting too. Edward R Murrow had his war reporting moment, but then he made a second one by fighting a cynical patriotic narrative in service to posterity and at great risk to himself. Not everyone can do that, but failure at the attempt is nobler than a successful joyride. Besides, it seemed to work out for him all right.

The above passage comes from Jeb Lund's op-ed for the GUARDIAN titled "Brian Williams will lose his job for giving us what we wanted to hear."

Link to the complete column: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/10/brian-williams-will-lose-his-job-iraqi-helicopter-story

Something to remember when violent movies get re-condemned in the wake of Connecticut and Oregon.

Reposting this comment made by "djiggs" on the HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site:
"From his review of Gus Van Sant's 'Elephant,' a fictionalized account of a Columbine-like school shooting, here's Roger Ebert on the media's behavior while reporting these kinds of events:
"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?"
"The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
"The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
"In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them.
"I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy."
This is Ebert again. I gather my point is what goes around, comes around.

Blog commenter with post-mortem on Ann Curry's demotion from TODAY host to NBC correspondent.

Yielding the floor to commenter "Bird" from the HOLLYWOOD-ELSEWHERE site:
Sure, Ann never quite had the snappy easy banter with Matt that Katie or Meredith had, but ultimately she's taking the fall for the scattershot gosspy mess Today has become of late. You can't follow a report on an upcoming Supreme Court ruling with the latest on a reality "star". I mean, unless she was the victim of a terrorist attack there is no reason any [Kardashian] should be mentioned in the top half of the 7am hour.
Good luck to Ann, and my condolences to her replacement.

Meaningful words from commenter on NEW YORK magazine factoid about Meredith Vieira's return to NBC.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/meredith_vieira_returning_to_n.html

Here's commenter JWFS on the above post:
who cares? my therapist tells me not to get "involved " in other people's lives--like meredith viera--"get your own life" --she is right-- i have kind of am empty life and have found gossip and interest in what "meredith is doing" a way to fill the hole-- who really cares what meredith is doing? the world around is collapsing around us--- when i take media "fasts" i am a much happier person--otherwise i get swallowed up by useless information

And here's what Elton John said about all this stuff 23 years ago (though the song GOODBYE MARLON BRANDO gets a literal-minded video treatment here):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4sIr7kwS1M