I spent about four minutes last night processing this before the Stewart news broke, at which point my Facebook News Feed blew up.
Here, for me, are the key two paragraphs from the NYT write up: Ms. Turness said in a memo to NBC News staff that executives decided to suspend Mr. Williams because he misrepresented the Iraq episode on the “Nightly News” broadcast. She said that executives also were concerned about the way he portrayed his reporting away from his newscasts. That includes his descriptions of reporting on Hurricane Katrina as well as other coverage. “We have concerns about comments that occurred outside NBC News while Brian was talking about his experiences in the field,” she said. I am reading this as the suspension is for the 2015 NN hockey game incident and the incidents that have come to light as seemingly everybody except my son decided to fact-check everything Williams has said on any non-NBC Nightly News medium since the dawn of television. Based on that, this is almost on par with the initial suspension for Ray Rice for absurdity. PGage has discussed the memory thing repeatedly. And if you're going to go back that far to discuss questionable conversations, at some point you've reached a proverbial statute of limitations. This smacks of an organization that couldn't figure out what to do, so they decided to arbitrarily punish him (and, it's worth noting, they reserve the right to continue this, as the investigation is ongoing) because he went into a situation where there wasn't any rules and the optics were getting bad. I actually would've been able to buy termination (even though I think that would've been too severe) before this. This seems to be some weird discipline that fundamentally screws Williams while "protecting" a brand that's barely worth anything. On Tue Feb 10 2015 at 7:05:07 PM Joe Hass <[email protected]> wrote: > Six month suspension without pay, per Brian Stelter via NBC sources > > On Thu, Feb 5, 2015, 09:00 Bob Jersey <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> He apologized Wednesday (4) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33RSg9CBtUY> >> ('toob) for having said on NBC's telecast of an NHL game as part of a >> ceremony honouring a servicemember* -* and in 2013 to Dave - that a >> chopper he was in while covering Iraq fighting in 2003 got hit by enemy >> fire... the US military-newser Stars and Stripes busted him >> <http://www.stripes.com/news/us/nbc-s-brian-williams-recants-iraq-story-after-soldiers-protest-1.327792> >> (link) after gripes from three actual occupants of the attacked craft that >> he was in a different chopper... >> >> B >> >> -- >> -- >> TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "TV or Not TV" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected] >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected] >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "TVorNotTV" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
