Kurtz: NBC ‘Desperately’ Wants to Keep Brian Williams

Fox News Media Analyst Howard Kurtz stated that “NBC, very desperately would like to hang onto” Brian Williams, but that “it’s getting increasingly difficult to do that” on Monday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel.

“I think NBC, very desperately would like to hang onto him because he’s the franchise, I think it’s getting increasingly difficult to do that, and he has no way, right now, to turn it around” he declared.

Kurtz also said “Brian Williams has now told seven or eight different versions, exaggerated versions, deceptive versions of the same Iraq story. Here’s the situation, Megyn, Brian Williams is in utter limbo right now, because the strategy he had to save himself has collapsed, and here’s why. First, he did the apology, but the apology contained inaccuracies, everybody, including people close to him even say he botched it. Then he self-deported off ‘NBC Nightly News,’ but that made NBC executives look like they were not in charge, and this investigation they’re supposedly conducting is not really an investigation. He was going to go on ‘Letterman’ this week, but things got so toxic, and as you noted on ‘O’Reilly’ earlier, new questions about some of his Hurricane Katrina reporting, which I think remains in dispute, has made it impossible to do that, so what he has to do, is find a way to address whether there’s a pattern of deception here on these various stories. And he has to seek the forgiveness of the American public, but right now he doesn’t have a forum to do that.”

Kurtz concluded “I’m not here defending what Brian Williams did, as a journalist, I obviously feel some sympathy what he’s going through. It’s all a self-inflicted wound, but this is like every other public figure who falls and makes a mistake, you just get eviscerated online, everybody’s got an opinion, and it just gets out of control, and it becomes like a wildfire. And that part of it, and I’ve talked about this before, really troubles me about the kind of society that we have become. Again, not letting him off the hook.”

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