The Daily Nightly began on May 31, 2005. As Brian wrote in his first post it aims to provide a narrative of the broadcast day and a window into the editorial process at NBC Nightly News. Brian weighs in every weekday and NBC News correspondents and producers post regularly.
Brian Williams became the seventh anchor and managing editor in the history of NBC Nightly News on December 2, 2004. Read his full biography.
 |
|
 |
|
 |
advertisement
About the broadcast | Biographies
RSS is an easy way to get the news you want as it is updated even if you are not on MSNBC.com. More information about MSNBC.com's RSS feeds.
Podcasting brings you audio and video from each weekday broadcast on your iPod or other portable MP3 player anytime, anywhere. More information about MSNBC.com's podcasts.
Sign-up for our daily e-mail newsletter. It offers a preview of the stories and special reports featured on each weekday broadcast.
A war changes hour by hour, so a plan in the morning for a story is likely to change significantly by afternoon. That, indeed, had happened by the time correspondent Martin Fletcher called me from northern Israel at mid-day yesterday to review his story for last night's broadcast.
A visit to a bomb shelter in Nahariya by Fletcher, producer Kevin Monahan and cameraman Chaim Dekel began with the simple idea of checking on how people were doing after several days in the shelter. But as our team emerged, a series of rockets fired by Hezbollah militants started crashing into the neighborhood. Fletcher and our crew ran toward the places where the rockets came down, documenting the panic that unfolded and ending up at a field where a man was dead, his mother (in the confusion everyone first thought she was his wife) desperately trying to call him on the cell phone that, it turned out, lay ringing next to his body.
Discuss (2 comments) 
Email this | 
Link to thisWhat do 2,000 pairs of dog booties ($68,442) and a 63-inch plasma TV ($7,790) have in common? They were bought by FEMA employees with their government-issued credit cards. And they were never used.
Just two examples from a long list of questionable -- in some cases bizarre -- spending uncovered in a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. It's the kind of story that normally would be a slam-dunk to make it into NBC Nightly News. But with so much news coming out of the Middle East, there just isn't room right now.
So we'll digest the report, do what we can to advance the story, and quiz FEMA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, on what they're doing about it. And we'll be ready to do the full story -- when time permits.
Discuss (9 comments) Email this | Link to thisApologies that our video blog, "Early Nightly," in only its third day of life, will today be late, owing to the logistics of getting videotape out of a battle zone. It has been shot and is in the camera, and will soon be driven to Tel Aviv and fed out.
We are driving in an armored car through the rocket corridor of Northern Israel while listening to Israeli radio describe the rocket volley that just landed near Kiryat Shmona, right out our windshield a few miles ahead of us. We are safe where we are, at the bottom of a ridgeline on a four-lane highway protected by terrain. It's like watching a war at a (relatively) safe distance. We stopped earlier at a scene reminiscent of this time of year in Montana: a fire-fighting aircraft working to put out a brushfire on a foothill. The difference? The fire was caused by an errant Katyusha rocket strike. At the wheel is our friend and superb driver Uzi, and I'm with producers Subrata De and Jean Harper. Subrata's still pictures for this blog have been of sufficient quality to cause fears among us that she will leave us for National Geographic. Lunch today will be an MRE, which Subrata smartly thought to bring. Dessert will be a Power Bar, which Jean smartly thought to bring. When I tell friends and family that I couldn't live without my travel team, I mean it literally on days like today.
Discuss (81 comments) Email this | Link to thisI stood here at the port in Beirut this afternoon watching the desperation on so many faces as they waited to board the Orient Queen that was to take more than 700 Americans to safety in Cyrpus. But, in spite of the clear sense of anxiety and anticipation among the Americans waiting to set their feet on the gangplank of the ship, I couldn’t help but have a smile on my face for one fleeting moment.
I had just met one young boy who reached into his bag and showed me who he was bringing out of Lebanon to the safety of Cyprus. He was rescuing his pet frog named "Spitfire."
Discuss (3 comments) Email this | Link to thisHezbollah has fired more than 1,000 rockets into Israel in the past week. Fourteen of them targeted the city of Nahariya today, where I was reporting for Nightly News. We went there to tell the story of children living in bomb shelters, and ended up witnessing the random violence that characterizes this conflict.
Click here for a :40 video preview of the story I'll tell tonight on Nightly News.
Discuss (10 comments) Email this | Link to this
Photo by Subrata De, NBC News
Looking out the window of an Israeli Blackhawk helicopter at 1,500 feet this afternoon, I witnessed something that I'm told few have seen: I saw a Hezbollah rocket launch from Lebanon, headed toward Israel, at a distance of six miles. I saw a white smoke tower rise from the launch site as the missile left the launcher -- followed by an orange flash and a second smoke tower. Our helicopter tour of Northern Israel took place as Katyusha rockets were landing on the ground below us, in some cases setting the brush on fire on the hillsides. We landed in Haifa (where we'll originate the broadcast tonight), in time for the sirens to sound signaling an incoming missile launch. We stopped our three-car convoy and ran into the shelter of the first high-rise apartment building we came to. Most of the above depiction of our day took place while our cameras were rolling, and it will make up just a portion of our coverage from this region tonight.
Discuss (21 comments) Email this | Link to thisSenior U.S. counterterrorism officials say they are "mindful of and thinking about" the possibility that Hezbollah could reach out beyond Israel and attack Israeli -- and even Jewish -- interests around the world.
And should things become desperate, attacks against the United States and its interests could also be possible.
Discuss (6 comments) Email this | Link to thisEditor’s note: Much of the information here was first published in “Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World,” by William E. Burrows and Robert Windrem.
Israel is the victim of the changing nature of war.
For decades, it prepared for the apocalypse, building a nuclear deterrent force the equal of a superpower, only to have its national security threatened by a few thousand guerilla armed with small arms and short-range rockets.
Israel is believed to have more than 200 nuclear weapons, made up of five different classes of weapons -- missile warheads, aerial bombs, nuclear landmines, etc. Israel built its first two bombs in late 1966, according to "Israel and the Bomb," a new book by Israeli political scientist Avner Cohen.
Discuss (8 comments) Email this | Link to thisRight now I’m on the sixth story rooftop of a building that overlooks downtown Beirut. There are probably 70 journalists here and all of the journalists have chosen this location because we have a satellite uplink here that allows us to transmit live. So, we are all here and the biggest issue at the moment is finding a bit of shade.
It’s strange. It’s hot out here. There are a few flak jackets strewn about the floor here and some helmets. We have a certain level of comfort that there is not going to be any incoming attacks here. But, I say that because I know that the Americans are in the buses today and tomorrow it will be different.
Discuss (7 comments) Email this | Link to this
Before jumping on that helicopter for the tour I mentioned in the previous post (they are airborne now), Brian grabbed a camerman in the Tel Aviv bureau for an informal look at one of NBC's largest newsgathering operations in the Middle East. Click here to watch "Early Nightly" -- on the road again tonight.
Discuss (5 comments) Email this | Link to this
