Brian Williams is indeed in a tough spot. After a group of Iraq veterans called into question his story about being in a helicopter that received gunfire in Iraq in 2003, the NBC Nightly News anchor publicly apologized for “misremembering” the events.



Subsequently, NBC News launched an investigation into his reporting from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Now he has voluntarily stepped down from the anchor desk to wait out the scandal. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be back – but it’s a decent bet.

This would be enough to end many journalists’ careers. But Williams is likely going to be fine. Why? NBC has always positioned him less as a journalist and more as an entertainer. I’m not saying he doesn’t have plenty of journalistic input in his position as managing editor of his program, but most know him not from reporting the news, but slow-jamming it with Jimmy Fallon.

The former generation of nightly news anchors, of which Walter Cronkite was the Platonic ideal, was seen as a bunch of serious men who covered serious topics and had to be trusted by the people of America. Williams’s predecessor, Tom Brokaw, was certainly one of those. You believed every word he said, but he never seemed like he would be a particularly fun or interesting person to sit next to at a dinner party.

Dan Rather, one of the key figures of this generation, was deposed from his role as managing editor at CBS after a scandal about some shoddy reporting 10 years ago. He might have fared a bit better if he was working today, when he would probably be less a reporter and more a person who delivers the news.

Williams belongs to this new generation of anchors, expected to keep us entertained as well as informed. There’s ABC dreamboat David Muir, who entertains Kelly Ripa with stories of interviewing Brad Pitt. There’s Anderson Cooper, known as much for his giggle fits during the pop culture segment of his news broadcast as he is for standing out in the rain during every hurricane. Cooper even took some time away from the news desk to serve as the host of the reality show The Mole and hosts New Year’s Eve with comedian Kathy Griffin.

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NBC has always positioned Williams with these two. He’s not doing soft shoes during his 30 minutes informing the American public, but he’s been on Fallon with stunning regularity. Williams has had a longstanding friendship and fake feud with Jon Stewart, a fake newsman if there ever was one. He was on the dearly departed sitcom 30 Rock numerous times, made several appearances on Saturday Night Live, and even let Jimmy Fallon chop up footage from his show into a version of “Rapper’s Delight”.

Then there was an interview he did with Willie Geist, now of the Today show, where he joked about doing crystal meth to get him going in the morning.

Are these the kind of antics a network would participate in if they were especially worried about their anchor’s journalistic integrity? In fact, most young people know Williams more from these stunts than they do from watching the nightly news, which, across the board, has seen its audience dwindle and age. Williams’s broadcast is still the most popular, but is that enough to save him?

Maureen Dowd points out in the New York Times: “The nightly news anchors are not figures of authority. They’re part of the entertainment, branding and cross-promotion business.” But she says this as if it’s the downfall of the nation rather than what the market demands. In a world where people get their news from all points on the spectrum of serious to silly, network news has to live in the middle, a sweet spot that is much frothier than the days of the Vietnam War and the Iran hostage standoff.

The fact is that people don’t want Walter Cronkite anymore. A study from last year shows that Americans find The Daily Show more trustworthy than MSNBC (though the same survey showed Fox News to be the most trustworthy, so grains of salt). But more and more people, young people especially, prefer the Jon Stewart model to the Tom Brokaw model. Williams is the only one of the news anchors currently on the air who gets that, and NBC has always allowed him to express his comedic side and even seemingly encouraged it.

Will repeatedly telling his anecdote about being under fire in Iraq hurt his credibility? Somewhat, for sure. Part of Williams’s job is to be trustworthy and an accurate reporter but in the internet age that’s not the only part of his job that matters. He’s nothing if he can’t go viral. That’s why even this scandal probably isn’t enough to get Williams fired, because his extracurriculars give him far more reach than other anchors.

And even if it does spell the end of his time behind the desk, I’m sure Comedy Central will find an excellent way to use him.