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It's about Time

Earlier today I was pleased to take part, for the second straight year, in TIME magazine's annual luncheon panel to nominate what used to be called MAN OF THE YEAR cover topics... thankfully changed years ago to PERSON OF THE YEAR (but more appropriately should be "ENTITY" of the year, as subjects other than individuals have been chosen 12 times in the past). It's always an interesting and fun exercise. My nomination is a woman, a mom, who has been assaulted on a near-constant basis going back many years and yet she routinely finds ways to prove how strong and resilient she is. Mother Nature.  My argument for this nomination goes: this ONE topic (and there are so many examples, from the tsunami to this year's awful hurricane season to the Pakistan quake) touches on so many others when viewed through the tragic prism of this past year: poverty, charity, race, oil, Presidential politics, government, global warming, class, infrastructure and more. While some of the others on our panel of mostly journalists and politicos agreed, we'll have to wait and see when the annual issue comes out just before Christmas. Many forget that Adolf Hitler is a former MAN OF THE YEAR, in keeping with the standard that it be the person or thing that affected our world the most, for better or worse, over the past year.

And one more thing: who do I complain to that the "media" got my nomination wrong?  I see that it's being incorrectly reported by the Associated Press that I nominated "Hurricane Katrina."

THE MONDAY SALVO

Tonight we'll begin the broadcast with the latest piece of the past that has been discovered in the vetting process surrounding the nomination of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court.  Pete Williams will have that story from Washington.  Also tonight, Andrea Mitchell will offer us a reality check on what the Democrats really knew during the build-up to war...vis-a-vis President Bush's assertion that they had access to the very same intelligence that he did.  Mike Taibbi was there for the first day of school this morning for a particularly hard-hit Parish in Louisiana...and we'll take a look at the fascinating and frightening amateur videotape of this weekend's tornado strike in Iowa.  We'll end the broadcast with our first installment in a series we're calling "Making a Difference" (with periodic features in the future all bearing this title) -- focusing on people who are doing just that.

A GREAT MOMENT IN TELEVISION

There are checks and balances built into the television business to ensure that those of us who have on-air jobs don't get too full of ourselves. I consider myself blessed to have a robust home life to go home to each night -- a busy place where any self-importance is forced to give way upon crossing the threshold. There was also this scene in the hallway outside our newsroom recently: While en route to the studio at 6:25 p.m. to do the newscast one evening last week, I passed a tour group going in the other direction. We often encounter these groups (they are led by a consistently bright, cheerful and able fleet of NBC Pages) as they file through our hallways every few minutes each day. We often have very pleasant encounters with members of the public who are taking the tour. On this particular day, one man in the group paused as I entered the Nightly News studio. He gave me a look of recognition, he half-waved and smiled... clearly understanding that I was moments away from anchoring this nation's highest-rated evening newscast. It was obviously important to him to say something that took advantage of the moment, and he did: "Go get 'em, Tom!"

We hope you'll join us tonight.

Read more from Brian Williams 2005

Making a Difference

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