What can Brian Williams do next? Here are 5 possibilities

With Brian Williams announcing that he’s taking a leave from anchoring the NBC Nightly News — the duration, unspecified—we’re left to wonder what happens next.

For him, the best-case scenario would have his bosses at NBC concluding that it was all an innocent mixup, and welcome him back to the anchor chair with open arms.

The problem with that, of course, is that he will always have this cloud hovering over him. The viewing public will never again see him quite the same way. Even if it was just one of those things, a mix-up, a blunder, a boo-boo…it went on for over a decade, and it will continue to raise questions about virtually every story he reads, every event he covers, every anecdote he shares. Did that really happen or did he fabricate it? Doubts about Katrina are just the beginning of his problems.

So if he ends up being dismissed, what can a high-profile, world-famous anchorman at the peak of his career do? He’s in his mid-50s. He could, conceivably, have decades of time to kill.

Based on others who have found themselves in similar straits, here are some possibilities:

1. Do a Deborah Norville. She wasn’t caught in a journalistic scandal, but she had the misfortune of presiding over a disastrous period at the TODAY show in the late 1980s. She left for maternity leave in 1991 and never came back. Norville shrewdly decided to wait things out. She stayed out of the public eye and hosted a radio show for a couple years, before joining CBS News as a correspondent—not an anchor—for the magazine show “Street Stories,” anchored by Ed Bradley. [I was the writer for the show.] CBS eventually gave her opportunities to substitute on the Evening News and report for other shows, including “48 Hours.” That led to an Emmy Award and, in 1995, her job as the host of “Inside Edition.” Twenty years later, she’s still there.

2. Do a Dan Rather. The problems with what was dubbed “Rathergate” are well-documented. Rather was pushed out of the CBS Evening News after that embarrassing mess. [I was a writer and producer at “60 Minutes II” when all that unraveled.]  If he had wanted to, Rather could have retired—he was 74—and spent the rest of his life fishing. He didn’t want to. So, what does one of the most iconic—and controversial— journalistic figures of the 20th century do when he’s been unceremoniously sacked? He accepted an offer by Mark Cuban to anchor and produce “Dan Rather Reports” on cable. He also shows up often on TV (mostly on MSNBC) as a commentator.

3. Do a Janet Cook. Probably the most infamous of disgraced journalists, Washington Post writer Janet Cook won a Pulitzer in 1981 for “Jimmy’s World,” the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict that turned out to be pure fiction. Cook was fired from the Post, returned the Pulitzer, and disappeared. She popped up a few times in the 1990s to tell her story, most notably on the Phil Donahue show, and reportedly sold a film treatment of her life story for over a million dollars.

4. Do a David Gregory. Similar to Deborah Norville, he left NBC in 2014 over bad ratings.  A veteran journalist with a lot of years and a lot of experience under his belt, he seems to be weighing his options. (His NBC buyout was a reported $4 million, so he’s probably not worried about paying his rent or his Visa bill.) In his first on air appearance since leaving the network, he popped up on Yahoo! with Katie Couric last fall to offer analysis on election night. Otherwise, he’s laying low.

5. Do a Brian Williams. That is, do something no one else has done. He could step out of the limelight. Give back. Become an advocate for veterans, the poor, the homeless. Looking back on how he began his career, he could support rescue workers and firefighters. He could form his own production company and work behind the scenes. He also might do some soul-searching. Figure out what went wrong here, and why. (He’s Catholic; how about a 30-day Ignatian retreat?) The American public has proven again and again it is willing to forgive almost anything—remember Marv Albert?—and it’s entirely possible he could return to television in a couple years, reinvented or maybe, redeemed.

Fitzgerald (another Catholic) famously said there are no second acts in American life, but I think we know that’s not true—and, indeed, our faith tells us something altogether different. Every day is the next act, and we are constantly afforded the chance to change—to restage or rewrite the arc of our lives. Conversion is a daily choice, not a one-time thing.

That’s something for all of us to remember—not just celebrity journalists who are suffering from career implosion.