New York — Bob WRIGHT, the chairman of NBC Universal, has a theory about his prize employee, Brian Williams, who this week will become the face of the nation's top-rated newscast.
"Early on in his broadcast career," Wright mused recently, "somebody sat him down and said, 'If you don't act serious all the time, people won't take you seriously.' And that gave him a picture of himself in the back of his mind...."
Here's the picture, off camera: Williams as cutup, devastatingly accurate mimic, former volunteer firefighter, NASCAR fan. On camera, though, dressed in his impeccable suits, he looks more like the conventionally handsome, button-down guy central casting dispatched to play an old school role -- anchorman of the kind of newscast that was once an American dinnertime institution but now is increasingly losing younger viewers to cable and the Internet.
Williams has heard it all before and takes a certain perverse pride in his decorous style. "If you want loose, there's plenty of that" elsewhere on TV, he said. "If I have a fault, it's probably too many years of Catholic school training. I have still -- whether I am electronically or physically invited into someone's home -- a notion of how I should behave. So I wear a tie to work and I usually treat it with some seriousness when people invite me into their home. And look, post-9/11, most of what we do in these broadcasts is so ungodly serious these days, I'm willing to be called an anachronism if propriety is the charge."
Still, as the first network in two decades to make a major anchor change, NBC is hoping it can position Williams as someone able, as Wright puts it, to "connect to people at all kinds of levels." It's one of the main challenges the network faces as it manages the tricky transition at "NBC Nightly News," following Tom Brokaw's decision to step down after 21 years in the role.
Another surprise factor got thrown into the mix last week when CBS' Dan Rather said that he would step aside as well, on March 9. No replacement has been named.
After a decade of waiting in the wings, so long that "heir apparent" has seemingly become grafted onto his name, the 45-year-old Williams on Thursday will slide into the anchor chair he has dreamed about occupying since he was a boy ("I grew up thinking this was the sine qua non," he said). Unlike when Rather took over for Walter Cronkite in 1981 or when ABC's Peter Jennings had to step in after Frank Reynolds' death in 1983, it has been an agonizingly long transition, stretched out by Brokaw's decision to stick around a few years more than he intended, to report on the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
NBC's finishing school
Williams is walking into a landscape that has changed dramatically since he first aspired to the job. In the 1980s, he recalled, when he was covering the White House, Brit Hume, then ABC's White House correspondent, would stick his head in Williams' office and quip, "Are you addressing the American people tonight?" Hume is now the lead anchor for Fox News Channel, whose opinionated talk shows and around-the-clock news have been key factors in the roiling TV news landscape, siphoning younger viewers from the three broadcast networks that used to have the turf to themselves. Fracturing the audience even further are attitude-driven upstarts such as Comedy Central's faux-news "Daily Show With Jon Stewart," along with Internet sites and technological innovations such as delivering headlines via cellphone alerts.
Still, among the broadcast networks, NBC's evening newscast is the leader, pulling in an average 9.8 million viewers per night and estimated revenues of just over $100 million this calendar year. So in the last couple of years, before being entrusted with the premier chair in broadcast news, Williams has been attending a finishing school of sorts.
Although he was already a seasoned reporter and anchor with the difficult White House beat and an hourlong nightly cable newscast under his belt, he still had some ground to cover.
In 1999, a New York Post TV critic quoted Williams as saying on MSNBC, during a report on the Columbine High School massacre: "We should tell you that we are approaching 9:15 on the East Coast, 6:15 on the West Coast, on a day that follows one and precedes another, a day that is filled with 24 hours, each hour seeming like so many more...." And that was just for starters. Williams talks more succinctly now.
He popped up around the globe, including a recent trip to cover Yasser Arafat's funeral, as NBC sent him on a whirlwind of reporting assignments to give him the foreign experience he lacks. For a while, Williams was assigned to work with a veteran executive producer with four decades of experience in evening news. In the last eight months, he has traveled to NBC affiliate stations across the country, putting in face time and taping promotional ads. Many more of those trips lie ahead.
