I only pasted a couple paragraphs from the very long article. Make sure and take time to read the entire piece
Brian Williams's fabrication was just the latest, and worst, of the debacles
that have plagued NBC News since NBCUniversal was bought by Comcast in
2011. Who is to blame?
On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 4, the beleaguered head of NBC
News, 47-year-old Deborah Turness, dropped into a chair in her boss's
office on the third floor of the network's 30 Rockefeller Plaza
headquarters. Her boss, Patricia "Pat" Fili-Krushel, oversaw NBC News as
well as its cable cousins, CNBC and MSNBC. The two women, both sharp
and stylish, were close; Fili, 61, had hired the British-born Turness
from a London network 20 months earlier.
It had been a tumultuous period for NBC's news division, as had the entire four years since the
Philadelphia cable/phone/Internet giant, Comcast, took over
NBCUniversal, as the company is officially known. There was Ann Curry's
tearful flameout on Today; David Gregory's long slide to his exit from Meet the Press; the strange firing after less than three months on the job of Jamie Horowitz, an ESPN executive brought in to fix Today; not to mention ratings declines at several of the division's centerpiece shows, including Today and Meet the Press.
But that afternoon, after a long presentation to 200 NBC advertising
salespeople, Turness was feeling better than she had in months. When she
had been hired she knew she was stepping onto a troubled ship; finally,
she felt, the organizational changes she had made were showing results.
Meet the Press's ratings were edging up; Nightly News seemed to be stabilizing. "Things," she told Fili, "feel like they're in a really good place."
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/04/www.vf.com/go/editsub
Her sense of relief, however, lasted mere minutes. As she left Fili's
office around 3:30, Turness learned the startling news: the most
important person at the network, the face of NBC News, its anchorman
Brian Williams, had apparently been exaggerating an anecdote about
coming under fire in a U.S. Army helicopter during the Iraq war in 2003.
A reporter from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes had
called about it that morning. Williams was supposed to talk to him off
the record in an effort to determine what the reporter planned to write.
Instead, to the dismay of NBC's P.R. staff, Williams had gone on the
record and admitted he hadn't been telling the truth, not only on a Nightly News broadcast the previous week but also over the years at public appearances and on talk shows.
Stunned, Turness was still trying to grasp the gravity of the situation when the Stars and Stripes
story went online. At that point her biggest concern was the apology
Williams was preparing to read to viewers on his broadcast that evening.
He was already taping segments as he and Turness began swapping e-mails
on its all-important wording. Turness and the other executives who had
gotten involved quickly became frustrated, as they would remain for
days, with Williams's inability to explain himself. "He couldn't say the
words 'I lied,' " recalls one NBC insider. "We could not force his
mouth to form the words 'I lied.' He couldn't explain what had happened.
[He said,] 'Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain
tumor, or something in my head?' He just didn't know. We just didn't
know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best [apology]
we could get."
This post was edited on 4/7 6:29 PM by THE_DEVIL
Brian Williams's fabrication was just the latest, and worst, of the debacles
that have plagued NBC News since NBCUniversal was bought by Comcast in
2011. Who is to blame?
On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 4, the beleaguered head of NBC
News, 47-year-old Deborah Turness, dropped into a chair in her boss's
office on the third floor of the network's 30 Rockefeller Plaza
headquarters. Her boss, Patricia "Pat" Fili-Krushel, oversaw NBC News as
well as its cable cousins, CNBC and MSNBC. The two women, both sharp
and stylish, were close; Fili, 61, had hired the British-born Turness
from a London network 20 months earlier.
It had been a tumultuous period for NBC's news division, as had the entire four years since the
Philadelphia cable/phone/Internet giant, Comcast, took over
NBCUniversal, as the company is officially known. There was Ann Curry's
tearful flameout on Today; David Gregory's long slide to his exit from Meet the Press; the strange firing after less than three months on the job of Jamie Horowitz, an ESPN executive brought in to fix Today; not to mention ratings declines at several of the division's centerpiece shows, including Today and Meet the Press.
But that afternoon, after a long presentation to 200 NBC advertising
salespeople, Turness was feeling better than she had in months. When she
had been hired she knew she was stepping onto a troubled ship; finally,
she felt, the organizational changes she had made were showing results.
Meet the Press's ratings were edging up; Nightly News seemed to be stabilizing. "Things," she told Fili, "feel like they're in a really good place."
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/04/www.vf.com/go/editsub
Her sense of relief, however, lasted mere minutes. As she left Fili's
office around 3:30, Turness learned the startling news: the most
important person at the network, the face of NBC News, its anchorman
Brian Williams, had apparently been exaggerating an anecdote about
coming under fire in a U.S. Army helicopter during the Iraq war in 2003.
A reporter from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes had
called about it that morning. Williams was supposed to talk to him off
the record in an effort to determine what the reporter planned to write.
Instead, to the dismay of NBC's P.R. staff, Williams had gone on the
record and admitted he hadn't been telling the truth, not only on a Nightly News broadcast the previous week but also over the years at public appearances and on talk shows.
Stunned, Turness was still trying to grasp the gravity of the situation when the Stars and Stripes
story went online. At that point her biggest concern was the apology
Williams was preparing to read to viewers on his broadcast that evening.
He was already taping segments as he and Turness began swapping e-mails
on its all-important wording. Turness and the other executives who had
gotten involved quickly became frustrated, as they would remain for
days, with Williams's inability to explain himself. "He couldn't say the
words 'I lied,' " recalls one NBC insider. "We could not force his
mouth to form the words 'I lied.' He couldn't explain what had happened.
[He said,] 'Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain
tumor, or something in my head?' He just didn't know. We just didn't
know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best [apology]
we could get."
This post was edited on 4/7 6:29 PM by THE_DEVIL
