Lester Holt is poised to permanently replace NBC's disgraced and suspended "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams, and now he wants his $10 million salary too.
"There’s a lot of drama at NBC News," a source familiar with the upcoming negotiations
told the New York Post's Page Six. "Lester’s team feels that if he gets half of what Williams was making, the message to him and the newsroom is he’s half the anchor Brian was."
According to the source, Holt currently receives a $4 million salary, and he's been manning the anchor desk since Williams was exposed in February for lying about his reporting in Iraq.
Holt has mostly maintained NBC's ratings in the face of increasing competition from ABC, so it's likely that executives won't chance bringing Williams back. That means Holt has the upper hand in the negotiations.
"He’s got NBC by the balls — because there is no Plan B for them. This is Lester’s chance to get paid," said the source.
Other sources pointed out that Holt may not be able to snag the full $10 million, as that was negotiated in a recent contract — after Williams had anchored the news program for a decade.
"Williams' celebrity, the size of his contract, and the accompanying promotional efforts to make him the face of NBC News are all throwbacks to a previous generation of television, when the networks truly were mass media and when viewers had many fewer options about where to get their news," said Andrew Tyndall of the "Tyndall Report,"
reported USA Today.
"The skills that NBC News highlighted in Williams were those that made him a likable household name — his gifts as a talk show raconteur, his everyman charm — but also the ones that caused his problems in the first place. In a post-mass-media age, a news organization should promote itself on the basis of its journalism not on the basis of celebrity charm. Williams' special (and expensive) skills are therefore anachronistic."
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