Good Enough for MSNBC

Brian Williams Gets New Role at Lower Salary

. . . The broadcaster announced on Thursday that Mr. Williams, 56, would not return as the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” but as an anchor of breaking news and special reports at the cable network MSNBC. He starts in mid-August.

Lester Holt, 56, an NBC veteran who has been filling in for Mr. Williams, will become the permanent anchor of “Nightly News.” He is the first African-American to serve as the solo anchor of a weekday evening newscast.

Brian Williams to Take a Break

Hoping we'll forget in a few days. Or maybe hoping he can make up a better story.

In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions.

As Managing Editor of NBC Nightly News, I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days, and Lester Holt has kindly agreed to sit in for me to allow us to adequately deal with this issue. Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.

Personally, I prefer a disgraced news reader at the anchor desk. It reminds me of how seriously we should take their opinions.

From Theo's

Layers Upon Layers of Fact Checkers . . .

. . . aren't helping the news media much this week. In addition to the ongoing saga of Brian Williams serial fabulism (it's pretty obvious at this point he also made his story of seeing a body floating in the French Quarter from the window of the his hotel during his Hurricane Katrina coverage), the New York Time put their foot in their mouths up to their ankles when they published an attack editorial on one of the newly minted front runners for the GOP presidential nomination, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Yep, they consistently misidentified him as "Mr. Scott", who, as Instapundit point out, is not a Wisconsin Governor, but was a pretty decent starship engineer.

The title of the Time article was unintentionally ironically titled "Gov. Scott Walker’s ‘Drafting Error’ demonstrating that at least one person at the Times at least knows his correct name.

Ann Althouse (a Wisconsonian) who follows Walker closely points out that this kerfuffle has to do with Walker having directed the redrafting of the University of Wisconsin's mission statement:

To my eye, it looks like the changes were, first, to augment the mission to include meeting the state's "workforce needs" and then to eliminate what the editor thought was excess verbiage. Note that The Wisconsin Idea is still there in the first sentence in the words "to... discover and disseminate knowlege (sic)... beyond the boundaries of its campuses."

The Times editorial ends with some perseveration about "red meat for conservative zealots," but come on. If that editing counts as red meat for conservative zealots, this outrage over word editing is a big bloody slab of red meat for liberal zealots.

While Walker is one of the more appealing would be candidates for the GOP nomination, given his appeal to both the Tea Party wing and country club wings of the party, his having spent any time at all editing a "mission statement", a bit of verbal fluff ordinarily designed to gild the underlying wooden motives of the bureaucrats who run any large university, is a least a minor black mark.

She also note that the Times has "brazenly" stealth edited out it's error in the current version of the editorial.