Okay, so NBC is suspending Brian Williams for six months without pay. This strikes me as a real non-solution. Do they think he is still qualified to anchor the NBC Nightly News? If not, he should be fired or reassigned to some other position. If so, what's the point of the six months?
To punish him for fibbing and teach him not to do it? Geez, if the humiliation and embarrassment he's undergone in the last week doesn't accomplish that, how's sitting home for six months going to do anything?
Williams makes ten million bucks a year so six months without pay is a loss of five million dollars. What if NBC were to spend that five million on hiring more fact-checkers for their news division? I think Jon Stewart got it right last night on his show. There's something screwy when the only person held responsible for lies and misrepresentations relating to the Iraq War is Brian Williams.
Hey, how about this? Take the five million and the six months and have Williams do an investigative reporting special entitled Who Besides Me Misled America About Iraq?
In other news, hearing that Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show sure has a lot of people unhappy but I see they're celebrating on some of the right-wing sites. I just did a drive-by on one where most of the folks who post only refer to him as Jon Liebowitz to remind all that HE'S A JEW! Yeah, like he ever concealed that. Since the staff of The Daily Show probably won't change much, I'll be surprised if its politics change. (The only way the writing crew might change is if Stewart makes a deal to do, say, a weekly one-hour show somewhere and hires them all away. But it doesn't feel to me like the he's leaving to do a regular TV program elsewhere.)
So who's it going to be? Jason Jones? Samantha Bee? Jason and Samantha? Jordan Klepper? Jessica Williams? I have the feeling they may go outside the current staff. It also wouldn't surprise me if they found a new host for The Nightly Show and moved Larry Wilmore up. I'm also imagining some exec at Comedy Central asking Stewart in a pissed tone, "Why couldn't you have decided this back when when we could have locked John Oliver into a contract?"
This is all just rampant speculation…all but the part about how I don't think the tone of the show's going to change a lot. It may be a while before we know but I'm sure curious as to who's going to get the big chair there. And what Jon Stewart's going to do next.