READY TO HELICOPTER AGAIN BACK INTO THE BATTLE ZONE! Amazon makes first foray into live news with election night special hosted by Brian Williams.
Amazon said Thursday it plans to host an election night special anchored by Brian Williams, marking the company’s first foray into live news coverage.
The one-night special will provide election results and analysis on Prime Video starting at 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 5, the company said. Amazon emphasized it will be a “non-partisan presentation” pulling information from a variety of third-party news sources.
Williams will lead the special and interview analysts across the political spectrum. Viewers will not be required to have a Prime subscription to access the stream.
“After 41 years in the business — from local news to network shows to cable news — this feels like the next big thing,” Williams, who left NBC News in 2021 after a 28-year run, said in a release. “And the global marketplace of Amazon is a natural home for this first-of-its-kind venture.”
Williams hosting election night brings together two of former NBC president Jeff Zucker’s most, err, unique talents. Regarding Williams, as USA Today reported in November of 2004:
Williams has more plebian interests than his soon-to-be rivals, CBS’ Dan Rather, 73, a friend from CBS days, and ABC’s Peter Jennings, 66.
A onetime volunteer firefighter, Williams talks excitedly about the prospect of handling hoses and climbing ladders again on an upcoming story. He has been a stock-car racing fan since childhood days at the Chemung Speedrome near Elmira, N.Y., and is part owner of a dirt-track stock car team.
“No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian,” says NBC president Jeff Zucker, who once produced Nightly News for Brokaw.
As part of the Blogosphere Full Employment Act of 2015, Williams would of course apologize for lying about being in a helicopter forced down by an RPG in 2003 during the Iraq War, arguably the biggest of the many fables he told as anchor of NBC’s Nightly News. Rather than being fired by NBC, Williams was merely sent down to host shows for the farm team at MSNBC, until 2021, when the man who once praised Antifa as being the equivalent of the men who stormed the beaches of D-Day, signed off by lying, “I’m not a liberal or a conservative.”
Additionally, as Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post fumed in 2022: Jeff Zucker’s legacy is defined by his promotion of Donald Trump.
Zucker, as much as any other person in the world, created and burnished the Trump persona — first as a reality-TV star who morphed into a worldwide celebrity, then as a candidate for president who was given large amounts of free publicity.
The through line? Nothing nobler than TV ratings, which always were Zucker’s guiding light, his be-all and end-all and, ultimately, his fatal flaw.
Two decades ago, as an NBC executive searching for a way to goose the floundering network’s popularity, he gave the green light to a reality show, “The Apprentice,” featuring a flashy mogul whose soon-to-be-famous tagline was “You’re fired.” Trump had a checkered history of bankruptcies, racism and failed real estate projects, but his confident bluster made him a natural on television.
“The show was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle,” Washington Post journalists Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish wrote in their 2016 book, “Trump Revealed.” The stunning rise of Donald Trump had begun.
Zucker created Trump the TV sensation, which was the necessary foundation for Trump the candidate. Years later, after moving from NBC to CNN, Zucker recollected very well that Trump was a self-proclaimed “ratings machine” — a rare instance of Trumpian truth-telling.
CNN infamously took his campaign speeches live, sometimes going so far as to broadcast images of an empty lectern with embarrassing chyrons such as “Breaking News: Standing By for Trump to Speak.” You can’t buy that kind of media.
Zucker also brought on the air Trump surrogates who should have had no place on a national news network: people like the bully Corey Lewandowski, the sycophant Jeffrey Lord (who praised Trump as the Martin Luther King of health care) and Kayleigh McEnany, who later became a White House press secretary bad enough to somehow make one pine for Sean Spicer.
When Trump became the Republican nominee for president and started trashing Zucker’s network and staff with invective about its “fake news,” it was too late for second thoughts. By then, the standard had been set. Every Trump utterance became breaking news, and CNN, like many other news organizations, never figured out how to responsibly cover Trump throughout his democracy-damaging presidency.
Zucker expressed a modicum of regret in late 2016. “If we made any mistake last year,” he said, “it’s that we probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run.”
But he excused his decision-making: “You never knew what he would say.” Audiences were riveted, so what could he do?
Not to mention thinking Trump would be a pushover for Hillary. How did that work out in 2016?
After Zucker was pushed out of CNN in 2022, Wikipedia notes:
In December 2022, Zucker was named an executive with Redbird IMI, a consortium with majority funding from Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President of the UAE.[49] The consortium is a joint venture between Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners and International Media Investments, a media investment fund backed by the United Arab Emirates.[50] The position also includes an active role in the XFL, a professional football league partially owned by RedBird.[51]
The consortium’s planned purchase of The Telegraph, a prominent British newspaper, has caused controversy in the United Kingdom, as concerns were raised that the newspaper would be coming under the control of an autocratic state.
I wonder if Zucker gives any thoughts to the ramifications of what he set in motion twenty years ago, and how its aftermath will come together in November like a bad hangover? And I wonder if Jeff Bezos has thoughts about who he’s hired to cover that night?
