The trio of executives have said nothing publicly since Friday, when Turness confirmed that an internal fact-checking investigation was underway.
But this crisis is taking up all of their time. Politico reported that Burke held a meeting at his home on Sunday about it.
On Monday, the preliminary Nielsen ratings for last week’s “Nightly News” came in, and they suggested further trouble.
Williams had been beating his main competitor, ABC’s David Muir, all week, including Thursday, the day after Williams apologized on-air.
But on Friday, once the scandal had become a bigger national news story, Muir won by more than 300,000 viewers ages 25 to 54, the key demographic, and almost 500,000 total viewers.
Such a dramatic day-to-day swing is highly unusual in network news.
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But the current controversy now gets added to a list of other challenges in the news division.
Burke, the NBCUniversal CEO, must have cringed at this Politico headline on Friday: “The decline and fall of NBC News.”
Burke reports to Brian Roberts, the CEO of NBC’s parent company Comcast (CCV). Roberts has a lot on his plate, including a pending merger with Time Warner Cable (TWC). I’ve known him to be the type of guy who hates distractions and controversies. He appreciates NBC News but he doesn’t want it to embarrass him or his company.
Right now, this is embarrassing.
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