It’s a way to use Williams’ breaking news chops while testing whether viewers still trust him. Williams will definitely anchor breaking news during that span, and Chuck Todd debuts at 5 p.m.in the coming weeks.
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MSNBC said that Williams will lead its “live, breaking news coverage – helping viewers navigate big moments”.
MSNBC has been largely silent on the new former anchor giant within its midst – other than to announce over the summer that his future role at the network would be confined to MSNBC, which is now rebuilding to emphasize hard news over opinion in daytime programmimg.
“Donald Trump, who has driven well past the last exit to relevance and veered into something closer to irresponsible here, is tweeting tonight”, Williams said at the time.
And for those who may have wondered what this post-scandal Brian Williams might be like, the answer was immediately clear: he’s very much the same seasoned anchor, with the same flourishes. Except for an interview with Matt Lauer on “Today“, he’d been off the air since his suspension from “Nightly News” in February.
As for why, Williams offered this: “It came from a bad place. It got mixed up, it got turned around in my mind”. In a separate interview years earlier, Williams briefly said he had done some public relations work to help prepare for the pope’s arrival, but did not mention any interception plot or meeting.
A source at the network said Williams has no plans to talk about his suspension or return. He added: “What has happened in the past has been identified and torn apart by me and has been fixed, has been dealt with”.
Before Pope Francis even set foot in the US , the demoted MSNBC anchor returned to the airwaves more than six months after he was suspended and ultimately lost his job as NBC Nightly News anchor when it was discovered that he repeatedly embellished his accounts of field reports. “How do you bring him back?”
Lack said that over William’s suspension, the journalist “consumed a lot of news and information” and that it “was a quiet and private time”.
In 2002 he had said he was there when the late pope visited, but in 2004, he delivered the commencement address at the university and said that he remembered “shaking hands with the Holy Father during his visit”.
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Williams’s first assignment for MSNBC, covering Pope Francis’ visit, also has an ironic undercurrent. In a version published later the same year by Esquire magazine, Williams made no reference to a Secret Service agent, saying that he was simply in the right place at the right time.
