Bye, Bri.
Brian Williams has announced he’s quitting MSNBC next month after nearly three decades with NBC News.
Williams, 62, had been working in the relative hinterlands of the NBC news family for years, scrabbling to turn “The 11th Hour” into a hit following his six-month suspension in 2015 for falsifying details of stories that he’d covered, including one about taking enemy fire while riding in a helicopter in Iraq.
In a note seen by Page Six, he wrote to staff Tuesday: “Following much reflection, and after 28 years with the company, I have decided to leave NBC upon the completion of my current contract in December.”
Williams’ reflection likely involved his bank account. “Brian,” an NBC source explains, “was still on the Andy Lack deal, which was something crazy like $7 million a year. But his contract was up for renewal next month and there was no way they were going to pay him that money for an 11 p.m. show. Plus Greg Gutfeld over on Fox News has been literally killing him in the ratings.”
The source continued, “Brian is tired of being up so late, he wants to go and work on his own independent projects — he has no other deal with another network. But many insiders believe that he didn’t want to do that 11 p.m. show for a drastically smaller salary.”
(Lack stepped down in May 2020. Ronan Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill” accused NBC News executives — including Lack’s major-domo Noah Oppenheim — of killing his Harvey Weinstein reporting. Lack has also been accused of downplaying a rape allegation against former “Today” host Matt Lauer and of his own shady behavior with female employees.)
“I was on the air for the launch of MSNBC,” Williams’ statement reads. “My return years later was my choice, as was launching ‘The 11th Hour’ that I’m as proud of as the decade I spent anchoring Nightly News … ‘The 11th Hour’ will remain in good hands, produced by the best team in cable news.”
Despite the relative success of “The 11th Hour,” Williams’ star had fallen so far at NBC that he wasn’t even considered as a replacement for Chris Matthews last year when the anchor retired from “Hardball.” Williams, a source told us at the time, would have been “judged very differently” had he moved back to the early evening hours: “The audience wants red meat at 7, not a news recap,” the source continued.
Sources told us Tuesday that Williams has kvetched to friends of his late hours as well. “Brian’s been in the business for 40 years — truly I think he wants to take some time and spend it with his family. He’s going on his own terms, it’s his choice.”
“This is the end of a chapter and the beginning of another,” Williams’ statement continued. “There are many things I want to do, and I’ll pop up again somewhere. For the next few months, I’ll be with my family, the people I love most and the people who enabled my career to happen. I will reflect on the kindness people have shown me, and I will pay it forward,” he added.
But in true BriWi style, he couldn’t resist talking himself up one last time, adding, “I have been truly blessed … NBC is a part of me and always will be. 28 years, 38 countries, 8 Olympic games, 7 Presidential elections, half a dozen presidents, a few wars, and one ‘SNL.’”
Williams’ stock plummeted in both industry circles and the public after the Iraq scandal, a story he’d recounted several times in the years prior before it was outed as fiction. (He chalked up the lie as “misremembering” in his on-air apology.) The New York Times reported in February 2015 that he’d fallen from the 23rd-most-trusted person in America to the 835th, according to research by The Marketing Arm firm.
And the helicopter incident opened the door to the questioning of other Williams stories. Brandon Webb, a writer and former SEAL sniper who helped train “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, told the Huffington Post in February 2015 that he found the anchor’s tales of flying into Baghdad with SEAL Team 6 — and receiving various military keepsakes like a knife and a piece of a Black Hawk helicopter — “preposterous.”
“There’s a healthy dislike towards embedded journalists within the SEAL community,” Webb said. “I can’t even remember an embed with a SEAL unit. And especially at SEAL Team Six? Those guys don’t take journalists with them on missions.”
Williams’ — let’s charitably call them “exaggerations” — also hit closer to home. In February 2015, the manager of the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans when Williams was there reporting on Hurricane Katrina in 2005 laughed down his claims of seeing a body floating along in the floodwaters — along with the contention that gangs were roving the hallways of the five-star hotel.
“That did not happen in the French Quarter,” Myra deGersdorff said of the story, which Williams recounted to ex-Disney CEO Michael Eisner in 2006.
Williams even stepped on toes in his own backyard: “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw “[wanted] Williams’ head on a platter,” an NBC source told us in February 2015. “He [was] making a lot of noise at NBC that a lesser journalist or producer would have been immediately fired or suspended for a false report.”
Brokaw likely had his own past with Williams on his mind. The younger journalist frequently muddied the waters between his own coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Brokaw’s.
“I was at the Brandenburg Gate the night the wall came down,” Williams said in 2008 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, though he arrived the day after Brokaw, who was famously the only American journalist covering the Wall’s Nov. 9 fall live.
Then, years later, Williams made sure to place himself alongside Brokaw when recollecting his coverage at a Nov. 8, 2014, gala. “Twenty-five years ago tonight, Tom Brokaw and I were at the Berlin Wall,” he claimed.
Williams’ fabulism wasn’t even limited to the secular world: He was a student at Washington, DC’s Catholic University when Pope John Paul II spoke at the campus in 1979, and his remembrances of the day, shall we say, “evolved” from simply being there to shaking the pontiff’s hand to receiving an unspecified “blessing” from the man.
Williams’ exit comes as Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s top-rated anchor, recently signed a new deal amid rumors that she would leave her show.
She had considered leaving the channel — where she has hosted the 9 p.m. hour since 2008 — to launch her own media venture, but ultimately decided to stick with the company. She’ll develop new projects for NBC News as part of her new deal.
New MSNBC President Rashida Jones told staff: “Brian’s time at NBC has been marked by breaking countless major stories, attracting leading journalists and guests to his programs, and most especially, great resiliency … Please join me in expressing our deep gratitude for 28 years of devoted service to our viewers and wishing him the very best.”
