Disgraced NBC anchor Brian Williams could “revolutionize” TV news if he succeeded Jon Stewart at Comedy Central, CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter said Friday.
“I’d love to watch ‘The Daily Show with Brian Williams,’” Stelter told a college journalism convention at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Hollywood.
Such a show isn’t publicly in the works. In fact, a speculative CNN Money report didn’t even list Williams as a possible replacement.
But saying he didn’t think anyone in the news industry pictures Williams returning to his anchor seat after his Iraqi War fibs and other misstatements, Stelter declared: “I believe he can have a second chance somewhere. … I think he can actually revolutionize what we think of as television news if he did it with a little more humor … if he’s willing to call BS BS.”
Stelter, 29, made the comments during a question-and-answer period after a keynote talk at the 31st annual Associated Collegiate Press National Journalism Convention, which drew nearly 700 students and faculty advisers from around the country.
Albert Serna, a student at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, east of Los Angeles, asked Stelter about the line Williams straddled between entertainment and news.
“There’s a real opportunity for [Williams] to try something new,” Stelter said. “I’m not kind of rooting for that, but I wonder if that’s the outcome of this.”
- Also see video: Brian Stelter on “What I learned from David Carr”
Stelter — who in 2006 attended the same convention (in the same hotel) as a student at Towson University — was a last-minute replacement for David Carr, the Media Equation columnist for The New York Times. Carr died at the newspaper Feb. 12 at age 58.
“I wish I wasn’t up here,” Stelter said from a ballroom lectern. “You guys seem great, and I’m happy to meet you all. But I do wish David was here.”
Depicting Carr as a father figure to him, Stelter recalled how he came to the Times at 21 after a wunderkind blogging stint covering cable news and other cultural niches.
“David was someone who was given a second chance,” Stelter said of Carr, who overcame cocaine addiction to become what Stelter called the “most influential, most important media reporter of our time.”
“I’m cautious not to sound too critical of Williams because he had this amazing history, this amazing career,” he said. But Williams, like Carr, could get a second chance on “The Daily Show,” Stelter suggested.
In his last column, a Feb. 11 piece looking at the Williams and Stewart connections and sagas, Carr wrote: “Oddly, Mr. Stewart will leave his desk as arguably the most trusted man in news. And Mr. Williams will find his way back to his desk only if he figures out a way to regain the trust he has squandered.”
But in a Feb. 8 column, showing sympathy for Williams, Carr wrote: “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.”
Stelter echoed this Friday in the heart of the self-proclaimed Entertainment Capital of the World.
“I don’t want to say the audience is at fault here, but David was right in his column — we want our nightly news anchors to be more than human,” he said. “We want them to be entertaining. … Maybe it’s time for a reassessment of that.”
Representatives of Comedy Central and owner Viacom did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Diana Mitsu Klos, executive director of Associated Collegiate Press and organizer of the convention, said she was stunned and saddened by Carr’s passing, “but I began to think of people who were close to him, people he mentored — and Brian Stelter was the first name that came up.”
She said Stelter was extremely willing on short notice to take Carr’s place as keynote speaker, but “had to push a couple boulders up the mountain” to arrange for the visit.
How did he do?
“He was terrific,” Klos said Sunday after announcing nine best-of-show awards. “As someone who was an attendee [of the convention] as the editor of his college paper … he was just the perfect person” to speak to journalists just a few years younger.
“I told him to enjoy his third year of being named to Fortune [magazine’s] ’30 Under 30 Most Influential’ in [Media] … because he’s going to turn 30 later this year.”
Stelter, who had arrived Thursday night, took the red-eye Friday out of Burbank airport to New York City, where “Reliable Sources” is based.
Updated at 2:50 p.m. March 3, 2015
