NEW YORK — Watching a White House briefing in his office, Lester Holt said he had to walk away when exasperated reporter Brian Karem recently confronted Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the Trump administration’s hostility toward the press. Their exchange almost made him physically ill.
Holt’s no fan of press bashing, but fighting back that way is decidedly not his style.
“I understand his frustration, but I thought that we just can’t be trapped into that sort of thing,” the NBC “Nightly News” anchor said. “We can take the hits.”
Holt, 58, exudes an aura of calm on the set, so much so that it’s surprising to hear him talk candidly about how tough it was to replace Brian Williams as NBC News’ chief anchor. Two years removed from that drama, he’s in a tight battle for supremacy with ABC’s David Muir for viewers and advertising dollars in the dinner hour.
There were moments after replacing Williams, Holt conceded, “when I thought, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ ”
To rewind, Holt was elevated after Williams was found to have misrepresented his role in covering some news stories. Holt filled in during a limbo period when Williams was suspended, earning the role permanently when it was decided in June 2015 that Williams would not return to the job.
Most people at NBC felt Holt was a decent, thoughtful man and were rooting for him, said veteran television producer Tom Bettag, who was working at NBC with Ted Koppel at the time. That helped the staff navigate a painful time, he said.
“I was fearful that I would not be accepted,” Holt said, “that I had to earn my right to sit there and put my foot down and say no, we need to do the story this way or I don’t feel comfortable with that. For a long time, I think I was a bit more passive than I should have been.”
The feeling that “Nightly News” was now his show crept up on him. “I can’t even tell you what day it happened,” he said.
