The Deacon's Bench
Verne Gay at Newsday offers his prediction—and it strikes me as entirely plausible:
There are versions circulating of how a comeback might unfold, and here’s mine: Williams returns to “Nightly” but also hits the road, covering stories overseas of vital importance, going to war zones, going to blighted parts of Africa, and then — story by story, rebuilding a resume and a name.
He especially does this: Covers the U.S. military, and all of the enormous burdens that veterans are now facing.
He lives with these service members, tells their stories in great detail, becomes almost one of them by osmosis — while remaining an objective newsman telling the nation what they are going through.
As time goes on, that asterisk then begins to fade. As years go on, it may even disappear, or become a footnote — indeed an important one — to a long career.
OK, that’s the dream story, and probably the one Williams and Burke are now hoping to see unfold.
There are other possible scenarios too. An obvious one: Holt makes his own impact on “Nightly” and becomes for viewers the de facto anchorman.
He will in fact become the first solo African-American anchorman of a broadcast weeknight evening newscast in history. That alone is a powerful statement that NBC News is making here.
And another possibility: That Williams and Holt in some fashion share anchoring duties, with Williams on the road, and Holt at the desk in New York. That in fact was ABC’s game plan when Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff co-anchored “World News Tonight,” or until Woodruff was nearly killed by an IED in Iraq.
But most of all, how this comeback story unfolds is up to you — the viewers. Will you forgive and forget?
This is also an opportunity for the rest of us to do something Fr. Jonathan Morris suggested last night on Twitter: pray for Williams and his family. A fall from grace this rapid and this public has to be painful. Friends have said Brian Williams is “shattered” by what has happened. Let us pray he finds some consolation in his faith and in the reassuring knowledge that God’s mercies are far more tender than ours.
UPDATE: Over at America magazine’s blog, Raymond Schroth, S.J. echoes something I mentioned the other day, suggesting it’s time for Williams to lie low.
He should seize these months as an opportunity and go to a monastery or a cabin on Walden Pond and think, with professional consultation, about what it is that makes him brag and bluff and abuse his memory. Then come back to work. Eric Sevareid once advised the rising Dan Rather to take a year off, enroll in a university and read the great books of Western literature. Maybe if Rather had done that he wouldn’t have committed the slip in research that undid him. Brian Williams, at 55, is still young enough to grow.
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