Why did it take so long?
For a dozen years, Brian Williams played the unreliable narrator of a particular story: that he was in a helicopter, in Iraq, in 2003, as it was shot down.
“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on a broadcast one night in January 2015. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”
As we know now, he wasn’t in that helicopter. Stroll through memory lane with this CNN-compiled timeline of Williams’s shifting story.
Why bring up a five year old story about a 12 year long tall tale?
Two reasons: the first, this was four months before Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race. And it’s hard to disassociate the phrase “fake news” from Trump, but one might take an argument that the idea was already being sown because of a national news anchor's loose relationship with accuracy.
The second: after Williams was suspended for six months, the Peacock brought back its prodigal son, Andy Lack, to oversee the vaunted News division, to breathe life into MSNBC, The Today Show (and it’s $500 million per year ad haul), and Meet the Press, and return NBC News to its 1990s peak.
But the mid-2010s were not the 1990s, and cracks in Lack’s managerial style, as well as the shifting societal tectonic plates, if not the way the media business operated, were constantly shown through perhaps questionable decisions.
Yesterday, the network announced that Lack was out, as News undergoes yet another shuffle. Cesar Conde, who led Telemundo, takes the role of chairman of the new NBCUniversal News Group, which now includes NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC. Previously, CNBC was its own entity run by Mark Hoffman, who will now report into Conde. (One person untouched by all this: NBCUniversal’s doyenne of ad sales, Linda Yaccarino.)
After four months as CEO, embarking on a listening tour, Jeff Shell decided it was time to shake up the organization. Not only is Lack out, but Mark Lazarus will now oversee a new division NBCUniversal Television and Streaming.
Under Lack’s second tour of duty:
Matt Lauer was fired in 2017 for years of alleged inappropriate sexual behavior.
Ronan Farrow, then reporting for NBC News, was told to take his #MeToo reporting elsewhere.
Megyn Kelly was hired to shake up the network, and ended the exact way many thought it would. Though she did exit with a nice $69 million package.
NBC News, which had the tape, didn’t break Trump’s “Access Hollywood” video.
Any of these four events alone would squash any executive. But not Lack. He managed to survive. Many have wondered why it took this long to push Lack out. Talking to NPR, former NBC senior investigative producer Rich McHugh, who worked with Farrow on the Harvey Weinstein story, said it "is the right move, and while it is three years overdue, it is great news for the journalists at NBC News."
Lack also promoted Noah Oppenheim from Today Show exec producer to the president of NBC News, pushing Deborah Turness from that spot to run NBC News International.
However, according to Adweek, “Lack brought back NBC News as the No. 1 television news network among the advertiser-preferred demographic, Adults 25-54.”
(I worked at NBC News, on the sales side, between 2015 and 2017. The only time I ever saw Lack [my office was across the street at 1221 6th Ave, not at 30 Rock] was after leaving the office of another top executive.)
One interesting thing that caught my attention yesterday during the Lack-a-thon of reporting: The New York Times assigned its two TV/media reporters to the Lack news, but when it came to the story of Almar Latour getting promoted to publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of parent company Dow Jones, the NYT gives it to a breaking news reporter and not one of its other media reporters.
As NBC News looks to a new day, it has the chance to do something a news organization rarely can: reinvent itself while leaning on its storied background.
Perhaps under Conde, MSNBC’s digital presence won’t just be a repository for its TV content. Perhaps NBC News can continue to innovate on platforms, following its successful Snapchat program, Stay Tuned. Perhaps it can invest in more digital outlets, like it has with BuzzFeed, Vox, and Axios. But most important, it can continue to hire great journalists and give them the room to tell stories that need to be told.
Rolling Stones, “Shattered”
Some more interesting links:
Should Facebook and Google have to pay the media? (One Zero)
Mindshare finds Americans plan to spend less time with media after the pandemic. (MediaPost)
Facebook warned it may lose a key seal of approval for ad measurement. (WSJ)
The price of reopening the economy: tens of thousands of American lives. (CNN)
SSPs are working hard to make sure publishers get paid. (Adweek)
YouTube plans to let news publishers sell off-platform subscriptions through their channels. (Digiday)
Roku has a new ad platform (BusinessWire)
Newspaper editor now a ‘homeless’ blogger. (NYT)