TVNewser received several tips wondering what happened during the 6:30 feed of Friday’s NBC Nightly News. Brian Williams was anchoring from Memphis to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Williams began the broadcast with a live interview with Sen. John McCain. What they didn’t expect was a crowd behind them with speeches blaring through loudspeakers. Here’s the clip from the 6:30 feed…
Williams explained, and apologized, on his blog:
On the first feed of the broadcast tonight, a promised candlelight vigil became a series of hyper-amplified speeches, 50 yards behind us while we were on live television…Because I was at the center of it, and I could not know how bad a viewing experience it was, I did not know to apologize while it was happening — The McCain folks are angry, justifiably so. So are we.
But McCain returned, for the 7pmET feed. And this time Williams used a handheld microphone. See that clip after the jump. As one of the commenters on Williams’s blog asks, “The exit question, ‘where is your anger directed?'”
Oh, and since nothing goes unnoticed when 9.5 million people are watching, the blog Newscast Studio also caught this.