Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor, is taking himself off the air for what he says will be “several days.” He presumably hopes that the media firestorm surrounding claims he made about his reporting experience in Iraq will subside. He will probably be able to hang on—just as the Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino did. (I'm reminded of Marino because he just appeared on my TV screen as a pitchman for Nutrisystem.) In January, 2013, it was revealed that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a CBS production assistant and had reportedly paid her millions of dollars, in part so that his wife and six kids would not hear of it. Marino kept his sportscaster job at CBS. While Brian Williams is caught in a different calibre of scandal, it is safe to say that he will treat his time away from the news desk as a period of reflection. He will almost certainly cancel his scheduled appearance on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” this week. And, if captured by cameras, he will likely appear sombre. But anyone capable of a long view knows there are often second—and third—acts in American public life.

However, there are some scenarios in which he does not survive as an NBC anchor. One: if more fabrications surface from the work of hundreds, probably thousands, of amateur detectives online—eager to prove that Williams was not telling the truth when he claimed, for instance, that he saw a body floating beneath his hotel window in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. NBC's probe by its own sleuth, the investigations producer Richard Esposito, could also unearth more headline-making material. Senior NBC executives fear that Williams will fail to better explain what he did, and why his explanation last Wednesday on air was more spin than the truth to his audience. And, if Williams does comes back to the anchor, chair and his Nielsen ratings plummet, his NBC bosses will have more reason to decide, as management did with Dan Rather on CBS a decade ago, that his image in the minds of too many viewers has been irrevocably damaged.

But, while the spotlight is on Williams’s transgressions, a word about the complicity of NBC and the other networks’ marketing machines: The networks have a stake in promoting their anchors as God-like figures. By showing them in war zones, with Obama or Putin, buffeted by hurricanes, and comforting victims, they are telling viewers that their anchors are truth-tellers who have been everywhere and seen everything and have experience you can trust. On his helicopter in Iraq, Williams was accompanied by an NBC crew. Did they not speak up to correct the record for fear of undermining the powerful anchor? NBC had a stake in promoting Brian Williams as all-knowing, just as a promo ad for the ABC anchor David Muir that I saw today portrayed the lightly experienced forty-year-old as worldly. Brian Williams has valuable experience reporting from the White House, but, unlike ABC’s Peter Jennings, or Dan Rather, for “60 Minutes,” he has never been a correspondent overseas. (Anchoring a broadcast from Baghdad or Moscow is not comparable.)

In addition to the marketing campaigns, something else happens that often induces anchors to think of themselves as God. Each of them is seen in roughly eight to ten million homes nightly. They are seen by many more people, and more frequently, than any movie star. To walk down a street with an anchor is to be stunned both by how many people recognize him and how many viewers call out to him about specific stories. There's a respectful familiarity that is different from the awe surrounding Hollywood celebrities. The anchor is treated as the citizen’s trusted guide to the news. As a result, he can feel expected to dominate discussions, to tell war stories, to play God. It’s a short distance from there to telling fantastic stories—and maybe actually believing them.