As Brokaw Departs, NBC News Looks Forward

Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News and a Tufts graduate, says that the network’s transition from longtime anchor Tom Brokaw to Brian Williams will be smooth and successful.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [12.08.04] On December 1, veteran NBC newsman Tom Brokaw anchored his last edition of NBC Nightly News and handed over the reins to Brian Williams, a change that NBC News president and Tufts graduate Neal Shapiro believes will go well for both the network and its viewers.

Also: NBC’s Shapiro Defends Reporters’ Confidentiality

“All of us knew Tom would leave eventually, and he would leave on his own terms,” Shapiro told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Brokaw, who had anchored the nightly newscast for 23 of his 38 years at NBC – including time on the Today show – will stay with the network through 2014 helping produce documentaries.

“He’ll be remembered as someone who’s totally authentic and comfortable with who he is,” Shapiro told Cox News Service. “He’s totally engaged in both the story and how to tell it.”

Anchors like Brokaw, ABC’s Peter Jennings and CBS’s Dan Rather have held their jobs for decades, although Rather announced in November that he would give up the anchor’s chair next year.

Two years ago, NBC officially tapped Williams, a 45-year-old New Jersey native, as the successor to 64-year-old Brokaw, who had followed in the footsteps of John Chancellor and David Brinkley

Williams comes to the 6:30 p.m. slot as the first replacement for the previous generation of anchors, in an age where network newscast ratings have declined across the board as of late in the advent of 24-hour news and the internet.

Still, Shapiro believes that people develop and hold attachments to evening news anchors, telling the Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram that they must be “unique hybrids” with many talents and capabilities.

“You can’t be separated from them,” Shapiro continued.

Reuters quoted Shapiro as calling Williams “a great reporter,” but critics have said that Williams – despite hosting his own shows on CNBC and MSNBC and anchoring the Saturday edition of Nightly News – lacked the reporting experience to take the top on-air job for NBC.

“If you’re asking if we’re realistic in knowing the great challenge of changing something that hasn’t changed in 20 years, no matter who you put up there, that answer is yes,” Shapiro said to the Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram.

Viewers, Shapiro added, “really like him. That’s par for the course with solid anchors. They tend to win you over in time, once viewers feel they know him”

Williams, in contrast with the affable Brokaw and the homespun Rather, has been criticized for his stoic on-air manner.

“Brian is indeed charming and funny, so we’ve looked for more ways to show that,” Shapiro told the Los Angeles Times.

Brokaw’s departure was marked with little fanfare – “We’ll probably have champagne in plastic cups in the studio,” Shapiro told the Inquirer before Brokaw’s final show – and followed the next night by Williams’s debut.

In true television spirit, Shapiro summed it up best to television critics when he said to them, “the show goes on.”

NBC’s Shapiro Defends Reporters’ Confidentiality

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [12.8.04] As NBC News president Neal Shapiro was busy lauding the journalistic accomplishments of retiring NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw, he wrote in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal that reporters deserve to have their sources protected from being revealed via criminal probe.

“If sources can't be assured of confidentiality, they will be reluctant to come forward to the press. And if they don't confide in the press, wrongdoing could remain undisclosed,” Shapiro wrote.

The piece came in the wake of contempt charges against Jim Taricani, a reporter for NBC’s affiliate station in Providence, R.I., who accepted and aired a tape from a confidential source showing a city official accepting a bribe.

The government asked Taricani to reveal who provided the tape, and when he declined, he was charged with contempt of court. On Dec. 1, the source, a Providence defense attorney, revealed himself, but claimed that he never requested confidentiality from Taricani, who still faces sentencing Dec. 9.

Shapiro – writing before the source stepped forward – said, “Now, Jim, a heart transplant recipient whose required medicines leave his immune system vulnerable to infection, has to choose between the perilous environment of a jail cell, or breaking his word.” Shapiro called that decision “a choice he should never have to make.”

The news executive and Tufts graduate said that sentencing Taricani to jail would be “shameful.”

“Reporters are a stubborn lot, and Jim is just the first of a number of journalists facing imprisonment in this country for not violating their word and giving up a source,” he wrote.

Other reporters across the country have faced similar quandaries in recent months, although none have yet been imprisoned.

Shapiro, in closing, called for passage of a federal law to protect reporters from disclosing their confidential sources to prosecutors.

“Clearly, given the overreaching of federal prosecutors, Congress needs to move swiftly to enact a federal reporter shield law,” Shapiro declared.

At the close of the fall legislative session, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) presented such a bill that would protect journalists’ sources. It is expected to come up for discussion when Congress resumes session in January.