There were two big media news items last week, one national, one closer to home.

To some people’s surprise but not mine, NBC announced that Brian Williams will not be returning to anchor NBC Nightly News, at least not now. Lester Holt, who anchored on weekends and replaced him during his prevarication-caused leave of absence, will now get the job on weeknights.

The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reports:

Ousted NBC anchor Brian Williams began his apology tour on Friday, saying on the “Today” show that he “got it wrong” when he told exaggerated stories about his reporting but declining to say he lied.

In his first public comments since being suspended by NBC in February, Williams told co-host Matt Lauer that “what has happened in the past has been identified and torn apart by me and has been examined to death by me. I’m responsible for this and I’m sorry.”

But under prodding by Lauer, Williams would not admit that his serial exaggerations constituted lying. Instead, he said, it was “my ego getting the better of me” and “came from a bad place inside me” when he told stories about himself that were “wrong.”

NBC on Thursday said Williams would return to the air, but not on “NBC Nightly News,” which Williams has led as anchor and managing editor for the past 11 years. Instead, he has been reassigned to MSNBC, the network’s little-watched cable channel, and will serve in a vaguely defined role as a breaking-news anchor.

Williams, 56, was suspended by NBC for six months in February after he said on “Nightly News” that the military helicopter he was traveling in at the start of the Iraq War in 2003 was damaged by rocket fire. In fact, it had not been, and Williams was taken to task by American veterans who were eyewitnesses to the events Williams described.

The episode triggered an explosion of reporting about Williams’s characterizations of his other reporting exploits. News articles turned up multiple instances in which he exaggerated or embellished his role. The stories involved Williams’s descriptions of his experiences covering Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Israeli-Lebanese conflict in 2006 and the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011, among others.

“Came from a bad place inside me”? What does that mean? (Was the appendix removed before it could explode in 1983 “a bad place inside me”?)

The Poynter Institute does some after-the-fact scriptwriting:

Brian Williams’ attempt to explain himself to the Today Show’s Matt Lauer didn’t explain anything. And one reason his mea culpa rang hollow is because Williams did what children and criminals do; he used passive verbs when he should have used active verbs.

Williams said:

“I would like to take this opportunity to say that what has happened in the past has been identified and torn apart by me and has been fixed. Has been dealt with. And going forward there are going to be different rules of the road.“

He does not say WHAT has been identified or WHAT has happened. He does not say HOW those mistakes have been fixed and he does not say what the new rules of the road will be.  I wish he had said something like:

“I exaggerated or fabricated 10 stories that I told on late night talk shows and speeches. (Then name them.) In each case, I apologized to the people who were harmed. In the future I will stick to doing the news. ”

Williams said:

“I am sorry for what happened here.”

Something didn’t just happen. Somebody caused it to happen. He should have said:

“I hurt my news organization, I hurt my colleagues, I hurt my family and I have made a wreck of my career. I am truly and deeply sorry for what I did. I am solely responsible for what I said. I am deeply grateful to NBC that I have a job. Most of all, I apologize to the viewers of NBC Nightly news for having squandered their trust in me. I will now spend the rest of my career trying to gain that trust back.”

He said:

 “It had to have been my ego that made me think I had to be sharper, funnier, quicker than anybody else. I put myself closer to the action-having been at the action in the beginning.”  

He should have said,

“I tried to be sharper and funnier and quicker than anybody else so I put myself closer to the action than I really was. I was feeding my ego.”

There is no need to remind us your stories were partly true. Now is the time to own mistakes, not justify them. Everybody has exaggerated some experience to make himself/herself look more accomplished or heroic than we are. Just own it. …

Williams also spoke about his statements as if someone else was inside his body. He blamed the misstatements, exaggerations and some call them lies on “a bad place,” “a bad urge inside me.” And he said, “What happened is the fault of a whole host of other sins. What happened is clearly part of my ego getting the better of me.”

In a follow-up question Lauer tried again to pry some ownership out of Williams. Did he mean to mislead? Williams went back to that spirit inside of him:

 “No it came from a bad place. It came from a sloppy choice of words. I told stories that were not true over the years. Looking back, it is very clear that I never intended to, it got mixed up, it got turned around in my mind.”

There’s that passive ownership again. IT came from a bad place. IT got mixed up. IT got turned around. Own the mistake by saying. “I exaggerated the facts to make myself look better.”

“It came from a bad place” is like saying “The devil made me do it.”

Amazingly, even in the Today interview, he still got facts wrong. About the helicopter story that touched off this whole mess, Williams said on Today:

“I told the story correctly for years before I told it incorrectly. That, to me, is a huge difference here. After that incident I tried and failed as others have tried and failed-and why is it that when we’re trying to say ‘I’m sorry,’ that we can’t come out and say ‘I’m sorry?’”

Nope. Wrong. The problem here is that the helicopter story was wrong from the first time he told it on Dateline NBC. In that report he said the formation he was flying in came under fire. It didn’t. So he told the story incorrectly from the first and kept getting it wrong. Now, in his apology interview he gets it wrong again?

And the second part of that statement is one any parent identifies as the “others do it” cop-out. He said he tried and failed as others try and fail to say I am sorry. It is a juke move to get away from his botched apology on Nightly News that led to this mess. He could have accepted responsibility in January but didn’t.

Conservative skeptics of Williams’ work are not going to be mollified by his move to MSNBC, which takes liberalism to stupid depths. (See Maddow, Rachel, and Schultz, Ed.)

This is not necessarily the end for Williams at NBC. Peter Jennings became ABC’s anchor at 26 years old, and wasn’t very good at it.

ABC took him off its evening newscast and sent him out to report, and 10 years later he was back as an anchor of ABC’s three-headed “World News Tonight,” and then became its only anchor 15 years after that.

The difference, though, is that Jennings was put in front of the big camera before he was ready, as the face of a bad news organization. (ABC-TV’s gremlin-plagued coverage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination came two years before Jennings showed up.) Jennings, who came to ABC from Canada’s CTV and was the son of a CBC-TV news anchor, apparently annoyed American viewers by such foibles as Canadian pronunciations and grammar. (Apparently no one at ABC tried to correct him, or it didn’t take.)

That wasn’t about basic credibility (other than for being a Canadian reporting on the U.S.). Williams’ viewers not only will be reminded of his self-exaggeration, but will wonder what else he’s said that wasn’t entirely true, which leads to credibility questions for the rest of his career.

Meanwhile, my former (and, hint hint, future) foil on Wisconsin Public Radio, Bill Lueders, reports:

The Wisconsin State Journal has launched a new round of staff cuts that look more like slashes, laying off four staffers and announcing that three key departures will go unfilled.

Among the layoff victims are columnist Doug Moe, a veteran Madison journalist whom the paper hired away from the jointly owned Capital Times in 2008; sports columnist Andy Baggot, who has written for the paper since 1978; and sports columnist Dennis Semrau, who has covered local prep sports and the Milwaukee Brewers for decades. Brandon Storlie, who joined the paper in 2009 and has worked as a reporter and sports copy editor, has also been laid off.

Sources says these layoffs, announced to staff late Thursday afternoon by State Journal editor John Smalley, were not voluntary. …

In addition, staff was told that the State Journal will not be refilling the positions of Dee Hall, who has left the paper to work for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism; reporter Dan Simmons, who covers higher education; and part-time books editor Jeanne Kolker. Simmons apparently agreed to be laid off.“Yesterday was my last at the State Journal,” Simmons wrote on his Facebook page this morning. “Some great colleagues who certainly weren’t planning to be jobless are out of work. And as always the community gets worse with fewer scribes to watch for shenanigans and tell great stories.”

Moe, whose resume includes freelancing for Isthmus, serving as editor of Madison Magazine and writing a series of books, is widely regarded as among the best writers in Madison, with vast contacts and community knowledge. Baggot, Semrau and Simmons also have broad followings and deep experience covering their beats. And Kolker almost single-handedly covered the local book beat, in a city where there is a great deal of interest in books.

But in fact, experience is exactly what papers seeking to trim staff seem most determined to lose, because longer-tenured staffers receive slightly higher salaries. In February, the Scripps Washington Bureau laid off journalists including four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Sydney Freedberg and two-time Polk award winner Marcia Myers. Other Pulitzer Prize winners to get the ax in recent years include Chicago Sun-Times photographer John White, San Diego Union-Tribune reporter David Hasemyer, and Newsweek/Daily Beast fashion journalist Robin Givhan.

The layoffs at the State Journal are part of a company-wide belt-tightening. Sources say The Capital Times has also asked for layoff volunteers. And it is unclear whether the paper intends to fill the gap left by the recent voluntary departure of business reporter Mike Ivey. “No comment,” wrote editor Paul Fanlund, in response to a question on this.

George Hesselberg, a longtime State Journal reporter, lamented the cuts.

“Any loss to newsrooms at the State Journal and The Capital Times is a loss to the community.” Hesselberg said. “It means fewer experienced eyes, and that’s not good for the community.”