The Curious Cases of Brian Williams and Jon Stewart

Stewart at RallyIn a stunning one-two punch, the entire landscape of television news was changed in a single day when NBC announced a six-month suspension for embattled NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, while Jon Stewart announced the impending end of his 16-year stint as host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central.

Of the two, most observers believe that Stewart, 52, will be missed far more than Williams, 55. The similarities – and the differences – between the two men and their careers speaks volumes about the changes that are undermining the basic fabric of the business of reporting the news.

Williams HeadshotThe two men – direct competitors in the 6:30 p.m. time slot on the East Coast – had far more direct power over their respective domains than on-air talent usually have. In addition to being the anchor of NBC’s flagship news program, Williams was also the managing editor of the news operation, which means that he had control over which stories got covered, and which reporters got to cover them, not only giving him a stranglehold on both the content of the news covered by the nation’s leading network, but also on the slant the news was given.

Good managing editors have an intimate knowledge of the political persuasions and personal prejudices of their reporters and producers and, while many reporter-producer teams “own” a specific “beat,” limiting the discretion of a managing editor to assign stories, managing editors are crucial in developing or retarding the careers of both the on-air talent and the behind-the-scenes producers who are the real reporters on most stories.That is, in fact, how Brian Williams was awarded the anchor chair in the first place. He was selected and groomed for the position by his predecessor, Tom Brokaw, who, in his turn, was both anchor and managing editor of the Nightly News.

Brokaw with Vladimir Putin in 2006. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Brokaw with Vladimir Putin in 2006. Courtesy of Wikipedia

NBC’s stunning, if not surprising, announcement that Williams has been suspended for six months is the death knell for any comeback hopes for the embattled news personality. While other anchors – most notably Peter Jennings, who did a miserable job during his first stint as ABC’s evening news anchor from 1965 to 1967 – have regained the anchor chair after having lost it because of their poor performance in that position, no one has ever come back to the top job in a news organization after having been suspended because of questions about the reporter’s credibility.

At first, Mr. Williams inaccurate statements seemed to be no more than a case of casual image embellishment, but, as further revelations were disclosed, it became more and more apparent that Williams seems to have difficulty toeing the line between fact and fiction. Embellishing your own story is one thing; embellishing the stories you are covering is quite another. Williams’ fall from grace was reported avidly by numerous outlets. In one of the most stunning revelations, Williams’ Celebrity DBI index, a measure of influence, dropped from 23rd to 835, according to a report published in The Guardian.

In some respects, Williams’ fall from grace bears an eerie resemblance to the fall from grace experienced by the fictional news anchor Will McAvoy on HBO’s The Newsroom, in which Jeff Daniels plays a Brian Williams-like character who gets in trouble with the network specifically because of his transition from journalist to celebrity. The resemblance of a character in a satire about television news being upstaged by a satirist leaving a fictional news desk while a friend and cohort of his is being removed from a real anchor desk seems beyond belief.

At risk for NBC is the network’s long-term dominance of the evening news slot, already jeopardized by the surging popularity of World News Tonight on ABC over the past two years, is one of the most profitable half-hours on network television. Recently, however, NBC had regained the top spot. According to TVNEWSER, NBC held onto a comfortable lead in average daily viewership in the fourth quarter of 2014

Such popularity comes with a high price tag. In December, Williams signed a five-year contract renewal worth a reported $50 million, according to a report in Variety. Covering the news is expensive, so expensive that news organizations are often happy to break even without costing the networks more than they bring in. Brian Williams nightly viewing audience of 9.3 million viewers is not likely to disappear overnight; in fact, the shakeup at NBC may draw even more viewers as news junkies and vulture viewers tune in with even greater numbers to see how the Peacock Network weathers this storm.

NBC’s downtown rival, Comedy Central, is facing its own Rubicon as the network contemplates a future without its long-time superstar, Jon Stewart, whose retirement announcement caught everyone flat-footed. Stewart’s announcement comes on the figurative heels of Stewart-protege Stephen Colbert’s departure for the greener pastures of CBS’s Late Show franchise, which will make the transition from The Late Show with David Letterman to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert when Letterman signs off for the last time on May 20th.

Stewart’s 2.2 million nightly viewers represent a far larger slice of the Comedy Central pie than Williams’ 9.3 million viewers do at NBC but, with Stewart’s departure, the Viacom-owned network loses more than just a loyal following of viewers. Like Williams, Stewart’s name recognition is worth far more than the viewership numbers suggest but, unlike Williams, who was famous for being famous, Stewart has risen to the status of a genuine cultural icon, having made the transition from being a satirical imitation of a news anchor to the real thing, a serious person covering serious subjects in a finely tuned, nuanced manner that often blended satire with information, prediction, indignation and occasional doses of pathos.

Both men set the tones of their respective networks.  Stewart, as the executive producer of The Daily Show, had even more power over the direction of the program than Williams had as a managing editor.  As a media personality, Williams was very important to NBC’s acknowledged leadership as a marketing organization, with Williams being the visible face of many NBC promotional campaigns, but Jon Stewart’s impact transcended comedy to the point where the issue-oriented comedian became the most respected newsman on television while Williams was becoming the laughing stock of his profession.

In the end, it seems that there was a long-simmering but closely contained resentment of Williams’ celebrity status among other news professionals, to the point where many news people were quite ready to throw stones of jealously they may soon begin to regret as news organizations confine their anchors to just reporting the news again, instead of becoming the news. In a sense, however, Jon Stewart also became the news as his acerbic, liberal, egalitarian bias and his refusal to allow stupid politicians and pundits go unscathed turned him into a commentator nearly as powerful today as Edward R. Murrow was in his time. It is ironic, and disturbing, that a comedian was able to become the one of the most trusted reporters on the air through the simple expedient of merely reporting the facts while major network news organizations appear less and less able to perform that function. Indeed, one of Stewart’s frequent targets was the network news establishment that went along with the Bush Administration by boosting the war in Iraq, with coverage that included the helicopter riding Williams promoting the war from the front lines.

Jon Stewart will be missed, even by the people who were often the targets of his satire and well as by the many comedians whose careers he helped along. Brian Williams may be missed inside NBC’s news operation, but it is doubtful that he will be long remembered or greatly missed by the public at large. Now that the cat is out of the bag about William’s professionalism, reports are surfacing indicating that Nightly News staffers were not impressed by Williams’ editorial skills. Six months from now, when Williams suspension runs out, it is very unlikely that he will be welcomed back to the anchor chair. The new “interim” anchor – and that anchor’s agent and attorneys – might have something to say about that.

There appears to be a generational changing of the guard on both mainstream and late night television, with Jimmy Fallon (40) replacing Jay Leno (64) on The Tonight Show, Stephen Colbert (50) replacing David Letterman (67) on CBS’s Late Show, and players to be named later to replace Williams at NBC and Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. Jon Stewart’s departure, along with the virtual disappearance of most other “political” comedians from the broadcast scene, leaves HBO’s Bill Maher in the unchallenged position of  most senior political gadfly and comedian-in-chief. Maher has been ruling the roost as HBO’s resident comedian since 2003 as the executive producer and host of Real Time with Bill Maher. Before that, Maher put in a nine-year stint as the host of Politically Incorrect, which began at Comedy Central in 1993 before moving to ABC in 1997, which means that Maher has been dishing out political humor – and promoting both comedic and political careers of his friends and cohorts – for 22 years, second only to Johnny Carson’s 30 year run in terms of late night longevity for a comedian.

Unlike Carson, however, Stewart, Colbert, Maher and their ilk, along with those people at Fox, and occasionally at MSNBC,  must share the blame for the “celebrification” of the news business because they are the ones who have been inviting real reporters onto their programs to grill them for the amusement of their audiences. As Gretta Garbo knew, and most living celebrities seem to have forgotten, a little distance and certain amount mysterious ambiguity go a long way toward establishing and maintaining credibility.  In the final analysis, it seems that you can have credibility, or you can have celebrity, but you can’t have both celebrity and credibility at the same time.

It is not exactly certain whether people like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher actually consider themselves comedians any more. It is far more logical for them to see themselves as their audiences see them, as valuable liberal political commentators, offsetting the stable of unstable political commentators on Fox, and the more or less (but increasingly less) liberal commentators on MSNBC. With 2016 looming up in the collective consciousness of the nation, Stewart will be missed far more than Williams, unless Stewart takes a crack at politics. No one is very happy with the Hillary Clinton as the Democratic standard bearer for 2016 and, with more and more politicians sounding like comedians, maybe it is time to put a real comedian in the White House instead of an amateur.

A political future might not be too far-fetched for the very popular Stewart. In 2010, he teamed up with Colbert to concoct the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which drew an estimated 215,000 people to the National Mall in Washington, DC, comparing favorably with Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally that drew a scientifically tabulated 85,000 participants that, according to certain media outlets, supposedly drew more than 500,000 people. It is almost inconceivable that Stewart would retire during the run-up to the 2016 presidential contest, unless he has something else up his sleeve. After all, he is a comedian and the only hard and fast rule in comedy is to always leave them laughing. A serious Stewart presidential campaign might be just the thing that America’s moribund political process needs right now. The way things have been going lately, it is unlikely that he could do worse than the recent incumbents have.

Also See:

Williams, Stewart, Simon, and Carr: The Cult of Media Personality

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