Backgrounder: Brian Williams

By Kristen O'Gorman

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Lecture: Brian Williams

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Brian Williams was at the scene. When the lights went out in the summer of 2003, leaving over 40 million residents of the northeastern United States in the dark, Williams was there, too. As violence escalated in Iraq earlier this year, just before the fourth anniversary of the start of the war, Williams took his team to Baghdad.

Since 1986, the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News has reported major news stories on the ground and in the thick of events. Most recently, Williams spent the first week of March 2007 in Baghdad covering the war, making him the first U.S. network news anchor to brave the city’s IED- and suicide bomber-ravaged streets since Bob Woodruff’s visit in January 2006. “It is the story of our time, it dominates our news coverage night after night, and as a journalist, I believe it’s important to see and touch this story firsthand,” Williams wrote in a March 4, 2007 entry on his blog, The Daily Nightly. “The recent change in the tempo of the violence and the decision to send more U.S. troops were both major factors in my decision.”

When Hurricane Katrina hit, Williams reported from the eye of the storm of events, if not the literal epicenter of the storm. He was the only network evening news anchor to report from New Orleans before the hurricane hit, and he remained in the Superdome during the storm in order to report on location. He stayed in New Orleans to cover Katrina’s aftermath, and continues to travel there to report on rebuilding in the area. His extensive coverage earned NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams four Edward R. Murrow Awards (including Best Newscast), a George Foster Peabody Award, and an Emmy Award — Williams's fifth.

“I felt I had a privilege, an honor, of representing them,” Williams said of the New Orleans Superdome refugees in the documentary, In His Own Words: Brian Williams on Hurricane Katrina. “It was an honor to be with them in the Superdome. It was an honor to represent their interests, to do their pleading, on national television. I think this is going to change our society for a good, long while…. It has changed my life. It's changed what happens when I close my eyes, try to go to sleep.”

Williams has a history of making it to the scene first. In 2003, he was the first NBC news correspondent to travel to Baghdad after the city fell to U.S. troops. Later, in January 2005, he traveled to Baghdad and Mosul to cover Iraq’s first post-Saddam election. In April of the same year, Williams was one of the first to report on the death of Pope John Paul II and the only American evening news anchor to cover the funeral from Rome. Also in 2005, Williams was the first U.S. evening news anchor to travel to Indonesia to cover the tsunami that devastated the island nation, as well as the subsequent recovery efforts.

But before he was reporting from every corner of the globe, Williams was covering local news in Pittsburgh, Kansas at KOAM-TV, where he began his career. He eventually moved on to serve as a general news anchor on CBS for seven years, where he earned his first Emmy Award for his coverage of the stock market collapse of 1987. After joining NBC, he served as the network’s chief White House correspondent from 1994 until 1996. He was also anchor and managing editor, from 1996 until 2003, of The News with Brian Williams, which aired on MSNBC and then CNBC. Then, for six years, Williams was the anchor and managing editor of the Saturday edition of the NBC Nightly News before becoming the show’s full-time nightly anchor on December 2, 2004.

According to Nielsen Media Research, Williams is the most-watched news anchor, a hard-won status he implies is the result of his commitment to accurate, balanced reporting. “I believe the best journalism wins the most viewers on television,” Williams told David Bauder of the AP in a November 5, 2006 interview. “It finds its audience.”

Kristen O’Gorman is a junior at NYU, where she is studying journalism and history.

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