Williams was suspended without pay from his gig as managing editor and anchor of NBC “Nightly News” in February. But he did not mention why he had been absent, much less demoted to MSNBC. His successor at the “Nightly News“, Lester Holt, is regularly beating his ABC rival David Muir in the ratings, and “Today” is giving “Good Morning America” the biggest run for its money in years.
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“Williams’ celebrity, the size of his contract and the accompanying promotional efforts to make him the face of NBC News are all throwbacks to a previous generation of television, when the networks truly were mass media and when viewers had many fewer options about where to get their news”, Tyndall says. His first assignment is to cover the start of Pope Francis’s visit to the United States. And that was that – he was back.
Williams returns to the air.
Another user tweeted: ‘The pope told me how impressed he was when I walked on water during Katrina’.
The country music legend ended four decades of touring with his record-setting “Cowboy Rides Away” tour, but has said he’ll continue to play the occasional gig and has a deal with MCA to produce additional records. “I own this, and I own up [to] this”. Burkey began working with Williams in 2000 back on MSNBC. After an interview with Matt Lauer aired, one Variety columnist wrote, “It will be a relief when he can stop talking about himself, since introspection is clearly not his forte”.
Lack added of his plans for the network; ‘We are building a network that has as its core value delivering breaking news better than anyone else. In the past two months, as he readied for his return, Williams has “consumed a lot of news and information”, Lack said. He said that the pope blessed him and shook his hand when Williams encountered him outside the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. One instance of embellishment by Williams investigated by NBC was a claim Williams made in a magazine interview that he had successfully plotted to intercept Pope John Paul II during a 1979 visit to the campus of Williams’ college, Catholic University.
Yes, his every move on will be scrutinized for signs of the flaws that brought him down in the first place. It’s also a story with potentially grand visuals – the Pope at St. Francis for example, giving the vespers mass Thursday evening, or the Papal parade in Washington Wednesday morning. Instead, he will lead coverage only when big stories unfold, and the news he reports can be about politics, or natural disasters and other breaking news.
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Izzy Povich, MSNBC’s VP of talent and development who previously was a producer for Lawrence O’Donnell, is being shifted to executive producer of MSNBC morning news coverage as part of a shake-up this week.
