Knows For News

I tend to like Brian Williams. In my 'good old days' and well before he was the NBC anchor, one of his producers used to have me on occasionally to talk about Yugoslavia and/or U.S. foreign policy. He tended to ask good questions, he listened, and he delivered about as much as one could expect from a minute or two of sound bites. When he took over from Brokaw I expected Brian to do well, and he did. But in the past few months I've noticed a significant drop-off in the quality of his being the anchor (whatever the technical term for that may be). He's picking non-newsworthy stories, missing major stories, and often getting important parts wrong, incomplete, or misleading in what he does report. I've been puzzled by this, chalking it up, probably — this is entirely a guess as I have zero inside knowledge — to some odd combination of experienced staff being replaced by boot-lickers who don't know what they're doing and management insisting on further 'dumbing-down' of the news. But whatever, Brian should have had the smarts to try to fix things, or leave. Parenthetically, it's interesting to read this report on Brian's substantial decline in ratings, which assumes that a perfunctory check of 'story logs' explains relative performance among the networks isn't due to news per se, but to personality. More than slightly ironic that a supposedly serious news report on declining audience share for a news show has nothing to say about news quality. And a further demonstration that the high-class blogs just don't get it.