At the end of Sunday’s “Nightly News” Lester Holt asked his viewers: “We hope you’ll join us back here again tomorrow night.”
Holt will be sitting in the anchor chair tomorrow night, and the next several nights following Brian Williams‘s decision to pull himself off the broadcast “to allow us to adequately deal with this issue,” Williams wrote in an email Saturday. The issue at hand is Williams’s penchant for embellishment which has called his trustworthiness into question, and left his future as America’s most-watched evening news anchorman hanging in the balance.
Late today Williams canceled his Thursday appearance on “Late Show with David Letterman.” The thinking inside NBC was that it’s not known where the internal probe into Williams will be by then: he could be back on “Nightly News” … or not.
It was an appearance with Letterman in March 26, 2013 that Williams told the story of being on board a Chinook that was hit by an RPG. As we all know by now, he wasn’t.
But it was also during that appearance with Letterman that Williams reflected on his 20 years at NBC News. Letterman called him, “the heart and soul of America’s most-watched regular nightly news program.”
“I’m not sure I’d never leave the venue of news,” Williams told Letterman. “It chews people up and spits people out. It’s a young man’s game, and any other cliches you want to pile on there. When I go I’m just going to go. I’ll be at the Jersey Shore on a P.O. Box. But I’m not going to stay on it forever.”