Brian Williams is Giving NBC an Opportunity to Bravely Break with Tradition

(Update: NBC announced on Feb 10, 2015 that it was suspending Brian Williams for six months without pay).

In 1976 the brilliant screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky imagined a future of news where executives of a broadcast network could rationally decide they had to murder their anchorman because he couldn't be stopped from telling the truth on the air.

NBC should have it so easy.

Network was a bombshell that tore the veil off the holier-than-thou network news business. Fictional anchor Howard Beale sure looked and sounded the part, but the resemblance was only skin deep. The film was released when Walter Cronkite was still helming the CBS Evening News, a time when network news anchors were considered the Voice of God.

And they had the nation's attention. Four years after Network was released — the year Cronkite retired — the Big Three networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) had a combined daily viewership share of 75%, according to Pew Research — in other words, three-quarters of Americans who had their TV sets on at 7 pm were watching network news. 1980 was the year cable got into the news game, with the launch of CNN, dramatically altering viewing habits and expectations.

By 2003, network news share had dropped to a 40. Two decades after mass adoption of the Internet, it's now below 30.

Chayefsky's dystopian vision hasn't been realized in the most frightening ways. But now NBC has a golden opportunity to allow fact to fully follow inspired fiction that has, in many important ways, already come true for how we consume news.

For NBC, whose anchorman, Brian Williams, is twisting slowly, slowly in the wind, the future according to Network and the present according to the audience are in the balance. Crisis management can be a wonderful excuse to break with tradition. For NBC, it's a chance to drop what is working less and less and is aimed at a significantly older-skewing audience and incorporate more of what the coming crop of news consumers think of as the norm.

Thankfully, NBC doesn't have to go to the extremes the fictional UBS network did to rid itself of Howard Beale.

In the interest of full disclosure, my judgement as a fellow journalist of NBC's dilemma came early: I could not imagine Williams surviving the maelstrom stirred up by his "misremembering" taking RPG fire aboard a helicopter, and could not imagine NBC wanting him to try.

Williams is now hunkered down. He relieved himself of anchor duties starting Monday and on Tuesday the network announced it would suspend him for six months without pay. Williams had already cancelled a Thursday appearance with David Letterman on "The Late Show" which had been arranged before the current controversy.

None of is not good. Letterman's embrace is a comfort zone where Williams's personal tale from the war zone got its fullest airing two years ago and where, if the NBC anchor was in image restoration mode, he would have begun his comeback.

(For what it's worth, I think suspending Williams is a humiliation that will further damage his reputation — much more than firing him. I can't imagine Williams serving his full exile and returning to the NBC anchor chair and his position as managing editor. As unprecedented as any of this has been so far, that just seems impossible.)

But this is not about Williams, or journalism. And despite NBC's attempt to thread the needle it may yet still have a marketing decision to make. The question NBC needs to ask itself is: "Where can we go from here?"

There are three basic possibilities:

• Stick with Williams
• Replace Williams and stick with the format
• Replace Williams and the format

As I said, Chavesky didn't get everything exactly right. Unlike Beale's nightly broadcast on Network, real network news shows don't have studio audiences, or preachy hosts who focus on a single topic with a strong point of view. But cable and premium TV is chock full of it.

And who watches this programming? Not the aging (and by definition, expiring) demographic that the Big Three are trying to divide up, but people who have no loyalty to the broadcast networks. People who can't even comprehend why that kind of video aggregation, once a day on someone else's schedule, is any better than what they might get on YouTube, Vox or mobile apps.

I hate the phrase, but ask a millennial where she gets the news. Video probably won't be high on the list, but the video that does rank won't be from CBS, NBC or ABC. It will be from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart — once a rumored prospect to succeed David Gregory on Meet the Press for the job that went to Chuck Todd — or Stephen Colbert (now Larry Wilmer) or HBO's John Oliver and Bill Maher. What's their approach? A big topic that frames the bulk of the program, a strong voice that aims to pierce through WTF assertions. On demand, of course.

That too radical a concept? Consider a half measure before you realize that stand-up comedians make the best news analysts, and always have. Consider Fox's Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow from the right and left, respectively. They also delve into big, consuming topics with strong voices that aim to squeeze out talking points.

Setting aside the journalism benchmark as the main criterion would give NBC considerable leeway. But as NYU professor Jay Rosen gently notes, Williams isn't even acting like a reporter right now (NBC's investigation is not, as far as I know, being done for broadcast but for internal review). Williams is being treated, and is treating himself, like a figurehead. No need to think about his potential value should the smoke clear. As his ability to be a trusted reporter is evaluated, his marketing value is less than zero.

Marketing initiatives operate on different rules. It's about customer experience. That's why even a good journalist has to be let go as an anchor if the audience isn't engaged. It's why Network's fictional Howard Beale had to be assassinated on live TV.

Like someone with a great job, NBC could not have been expected to muster the courage to drop a good, sure thing for a flyer on a crazy idea. But surely someone at a high level is saying this out loud: NBC is defending an almost indefensible position to preserve a status quo that is on the wrong side of broadcast news history.

This isn't about money, since news divisions are operated not to make a lot, but just not cost too much. The reason anchors make so much money — Williams just extended his contract for a reported $50 million over five years — is because they are the face of a network's most prestigious division. They have unique talents, but as media critic David Carr (who doesn't think Williams should be fired) writes in the New York Times, being the solid news person in the Cronkite mold — i.e., to the exclusion of pretty much everything else — ain't at the top of the list:

We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it. That’s why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole heaving apparatus to far-flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag bearer.

We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe-trotting, hilarious, down-to-earth, and above all, trustworthy. It’s a job description that no one can match.

That, I agree with. The answer is to change the job description.

NBC would not have chosen to do so, but now it can, and I think must, break with tradition. And part of that is parting ways with Brian Williams.

For purely marketing reasons if it so wishes to frame it that way, NBC should take the knocks, scolds and wringing hands from the media elite, endure the guffaws from the chattering rabble that loves to troll and hate — and in five years or less, have the last laugh.