• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, February 11, 2015

It is irresistible to write a column today expounding on the irony of Brian Williams’ suspension from NBC for fictionalizing the news coupled with the announcement by Jon Stewart that he’s stepping down from the role of fictional anchorman that he plays on TV.

I plan to resist this temptation, however -- not because it’s a bad idea, but because so many columnists have already chosen not to resist it today. As a result, I see no value in adding my own version of the same thing to this particular scrum.

Instead, maybe I’ll just comment on the commentary and move on to some other angle on these stories, if I can find one.

As you may have noticed today if you’ve been looking around for Stewart-Williams commentary, the irony columnists are all writing something like this: Ha ha -- maybe Brian Williams ought to sit out his six-month suspension from NBC News by replacing Stewart on “The Daily Show,” at least until Comedy Central hires a more permanent replacement for Stewart. 

Or, as many of these columns are suggesting, maybe Williams should be the permanent replacement. Not only is he an apparent fictionalizer (a word you can imagine Stewart actually coining) of the news, but he reportedly aspires to a career in late-night comedy too.   

Whether he’s “slow-jamming” the news on “Fallon” or embellishing his own career by telling untrue war stories on “Letterman,” Williams loves to cavort on late-night TV. There was even a report going around -- originating with a New York magazine story -– that Williams campaigned for Jay Leno’s job when it became apparent that NBC was easing Jay out of “The Tonight Show.”

These “ha ha” columns linking the Williams and Stewart stories are not inappropriate. Quite the contrary: This approach is so obvious that you can be forgiven for wondering if Stewart himself recognized this irony and timed his announcement last night to take advantage of it, if only to see how many columnists today would write these kinds of columns.

If that was the case, Stewart was correct in his assumption that journalism loves nothing more than two front-page stories that can be connected and exploited in one slug (“Slug” -- newspaper jargon for a particular story or column on a news list) even if they involve two different situations that, in fact, don’t intersect at all.

Perhaps it is needless to say this, but I’ll say it anyway: The Williams and Stewart stories are not connected in any way, except that they both involve television and they both create challenges for their networks that are not dissimilar -- namely, who to replace them with.

For Comedy Central, Stewart’s exit means the end of the Stewart era (1999-2015) and also the official end of the Stewart-Colbert era (2005-2014). Stephen Colbert has already been replaced by Larry Wilmore, who has benefited greatly from his “Daily Show” lead-in.

Without Stewart, however, the lead-in strength of “The Daily Show” will diminish and so will Wilmore’s ratings unless Comedy Central can find a replacement for Stewart with the potential to maintain Stewart’s viewership. At some point, John Oliver would have been the most obvious choice here, but he’s committed now to HBO. 

As for NBC News, among the challenges they face is whether to replace Williams at all. This six-month suspension strikes me as a way of easing Williams off “The Nightly News” permanently by saying it’s “just a suspension” but in reality not planning to ever really bring him back.

But if a suspension implies that his absence is supposed to be just temporary, then how can they search for, much less hire, a replacement for him?

Maybe there’s a faction at NBC News that supports the idea that the public will be in a forgiving mood if Williams disappears for six months and then returns after -- what? -- a stint in truth-telling rehab? Or maybe this suspension really is, as one columnist suggested today, something like a sports suspension -- like Alex Rodriguez getting suspended from baseball for a season.

Whether we like it or not, A-Rod’s coming back this spring. Maybe Williams can come back too.