* Kudos to the Tampa Bay Times for sending columnist John Romano to Charleston in the aftermath of that hate-crime mass murder in the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Just like the old days when a major newspaper of record would send one of its own to assess a major news scene and report back. This was before budgets were trumped by news services, partnerships and technology.
And the Times sent the right guy. It was well chronicled, and it was poignant.
* It’s now official. NBC News has finished its marathon effort at damage control and Brian Williams, after a tortured mea culpa, will be taking on the new, decidedly downgraded job of reporting on breaking news for MSNBC. The partisan-opinion-driven cable network has a fraction of the audience that the “NBC Nightly News” has and has been in a ratings dive for a while. Williams starts in August.
Maybe Williams’ erstwhile star power–he has hosted “Saturday Night Live,” slow-jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon and periodically dropped in on “30 Rock”–will gin up the chemistry of, and consequent interest in, MSNBC. But it would have augured better for credibility had he not tried to nuance his way through that Matt Lauer interview on the “Today” show.
At some point, the equivocal talk about “misleading” himself, whatever that means, should have yielded to something like this:
“Matt, I appreciate the forum to formalize my comeback. It’s incumbent upon me–for me as well as MSNBC–to make the most of it. Here goes. I lied. I didn’t ‘misremember.’ I lied. I was a major player in the news-celebrity business, but I would periodically transpose which came first. I made up stuff that added more drama to the ‘Brian Williams brand.’ It’s ego. It’s hubris. And it’s also lying.
“The last four months have been humbling and humiliating. I am not more important than the news I report on. And viewers will be the ultimate judge on whether I’m keeping my word.”