A

BRIAN WILLIAMS
1959-

CORRESPONDENT AND NEWS ANCHORMAN

A Road Less Traveled

Brian Williams was a fast-rising star as the White House correspondent on NBC News when he took an unusual career turn for an aspiring nightly anchor. He accepted an offer to become anchor on an all-news cable channel launched in 1996 by NBC and Microsoft. Most journalists travel in the other direction, from cable to network news, but Williams had no trouble making the decision to front his own hour-long news program on MSNBC, The News with Brian Williams. He continued to anchor the Saturday edition of NBC Nightly News, however, and is rumored to be a possible future replacement for Tom Brokaw.

Background

Williams dreamed of being a news anchor as a child in Middletown, New Jersey. He worked his way through a Catholic high school and took classes at Catholic University and George Washington University. He never graduated and instead chose a low-level job in the White House during Jimmy Carter's presidency. From there, Williams spent a short while running the political action committee of the National Association of Broadcasters and then landed his first TV job as a reporter in Pittsburgh, Kansas. He moved to Washington, D.C., then to Philadelphia, and finally to WCBS-TV in New York, where he was a reporter and noon anchor for five years. While at WCBS he won two Emmys for his coverage of the 1987 stock market crash and the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall. In 1993 he was recruited to NBC and became Saturday night news anchor after only five months on the job. He won another Emmy for his coverage of the Iowa flood in 1993, and he and Brokaw were nominated for a 1994 Emmy for coverage of the California earthquakes. In 1994 he was assigned by NBC to the White House as its chief correspondent, while continuing to anchor the Nightly News on Saturdays. While working as White House correspondent, he accompanied President Bill Clinton on Air Force One, and he was the only TV news correspondent to accompany Clinton and former presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter to the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel. In 1996 he took the position with MSNBC and got his own program. Although a serious journalist, Williams also exhibited a great deal of charm and wit. He appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and The Late Show with David Letterman, and he was so entertaining on The Tonight Show that he was invited back several times.

MSNBC

Williams's willingness to shift to cable news was a significant indicator of how news was changing in the 1990s. MSNBC, a twenty-four-hour news channel, resulted from a $500 million deal between NBC and Microsoft. NBC president Robert Wright convinced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates to pay NBC for half-interest in America's Talking, a cable network owned by NBC that was shut down to make way for MSNBC, and then to put up another $250 million for Microsoft's share of building the new network over five years. By 1997 MSNBC reached 25 million homes (compared with 70 million for CNN), but the network anticipated reaching 55 million homes by 2000. The early success of MSNBC could perhaps be gauged by the talent it has attracted. John Hockenberry left ABC to host his own weekend program, Edgewise, and MSNBC's nightly talk show, InterNighty included Brokaw, Katie Couric, Byrant Gumbel, Bob Costas, and Bill Moyers in its rotation of hosts. Because cable news reached an audience more interested in news than entertainment, MSNBC was able to provide Williams with a place to develop his unique style of journalism without some of the constraints of network news.

The News with Brian Williams.

Cable news gave Williams an opportunity to do serious, in-depth news on television. Without the ratings pressure of network TV, he was able to cover the kinds of stories that interested him—politics, government, business, and the like. Assuming an audience actually interested in news, Williams and executive producer Kathy Sciere were able to run longer stories than would generally be seen on network news, as well as more foreign news and lengthier live interviews. While the show developed hard news rather than lighter features, it also allowed Williams to develop a conversational tone and inject his wit on air. Vice president and general manager of MSNBC Cable Mark Harrington explained, "Brian brings a great sense of tone. He's serious when he needs to be, because the news does deal with tragedy and sadness, and at other times wry and filled with amusement. He can have fun with things." Williams's continuous coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on MSNBC, which was simulcast on NBC worldwide, brought praise from TV critics, and after his coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800 and the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., New York Magazine called him the "complete package," and GQ named him "the most interesting man in television today."