Even if NBC News hadn’t suspended Brian Williams for six months from the anchor desk, chances are the time he spends on talk-show couches will all but vanish.
Williams’ willingness to “slow jam” the news with Jimmy Fallon, host “Saturday Night Live” or chat regularly with David Letterman or Jon Stewart made him a celebrity as well as a newsman and arguably contributed to the trouble he’s in over embellishing some of his experiences.
Williams has appeared on Letterman’s “Late Show” 21 times, according to the website imdb.com, which tracks such appearances, and cancelled his scheduled date on the show Thursday. He’s been on Stewart’s “The Daily Show” 22 times, appeared opposite Jimmy Fallon 18 times, Conan O’Brien 17 times, Jay Leno 13 times and been on “Saturday Night Live” five times, hosting once in 2007, according to entertainment website, imdb.com said.
He’s been on shows hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyer, Stephen Colbert and Rachael Ray, too.
He’s a go-to guy for these shows because he’s good, with a rare kind of comfort and versatility, said Michael Naidis, a veteran late-night television producer who worked most recently on CBS’ “Late Late Show.”
“You can see how comfortable Williams was dealing with almost any question in almost any format and before almost any audience,” Naidis said. “If the host asked questions, he answered. If the host was weak in any way and for any reason, he jumped in with stories, although, perhaps, that’s not as wonderful now in retrospect. If the audience was important and being left out, he changed that. He was good talking seriously and good joking around.”
For many years, journalists have felt the need to appear on entertainment talk shows to prove that they’re regular folk who know how to laugh at themselves, said Jeff Greenfield, veteran CBS and CNN journalist and commentator.
Any idea that Williams overdid it is sort of revisionist history, given what has happened over the last week, he said. “What would the evidence be? His news show is No. 1.”
There’s a certain kind of pressure being on a talk show, particularly for a newsman, as Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly explained on Kimmel’s show Monday night.
“When you come on a late-night show … you don’t want to be a dweeb,” O’Reilly said. “You want to have something interesting to say. What happens is, a journalist will say ‘I was there’ and then a story, to make it more dramatic and interesting, will emerge.”
Williams’ future as an NBC anchor is being decided now, as the network looks into discrepancies between statements he’s made and makes a calculation about whether or not he’s too damaged to continue.
It would seem likely that efforts to rehabilitate his image will include far less face time on late-night talk shows.
