Information responsibility from NBC anchor Brian Williams: sacrificing a one-time ratings spike for a more important story. No good deed goes unpunished.
Williams is a self-professed "weather geek" who checked on the devastating tornado outbreak in the South on April 27 before boarding an overnight flight to London to help the "Today" team anchor coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding.
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Picking up his baggage at Heathrow Airport, he saw a report on his smartphone that 83 people had died because of the tornados. The death toll was well into the hundreds by the time he was driven out of the airport. He asked the driver to pull over, consulted with his bosses in New York, and decided to book a flight back home. He arrived in time to anchor Thursday's news, then flew to Tuscaloosa, Ala., and checked into a hotel where the manager said the regular night clerk had been killed in the storm.
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In the short term, the decision did not pay off. On Friday, when ABC led its newscast with Sawyer in London talking about the wedding while Williams opened with tornado damage, ABC had 236,000 more viewers, the Nielsen Co. said. It was the first day since September that ABC had won. On a typical day this season, "Nightly News" has a 1.1 million viewer advantage over ABC, more than 3 million over CBS.
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