Is NBC firing Brian Williams, or just humiliating him?

Did Brian Williams just get fired?

NBC News on Tuesday announced a six-month suspension for Williams, the network’s most recognisable face, as an investigation into potential falsehoods in his reporting plays out. Now they’re said to be looking at his expense account, too.

To some longtime observers of the network news game, six months might as well be forever. Andrew Tyndall, author of a widely followed blog analyzing the nightly newscasts, told the Daily Beast on Wednesday that it looked like Williams was out. “He’s not going to read a teleprompter at NBC ever again is my prognosis,” Tyndall was quoted as saying.

Other knowledgeable observers winced at a perceived sharpening of tone on the part of NBC News executives in their most recent statements about the scandal. “This was wrong and completely inappropriate for someone in Brian’s position,” NBC News president Deborah Turness said in a memo.

But fired? Not so fast, said Al Tompkins, a veteran TV newsman and a member of the senior faculty for broadcasting at the Poynter Institute.

“It seems to me that if NBC launched an investigation, then they’ve got to play that out,” said Tompkins. “They can’t take a career-ending decision without finishing the review, unless the review already has turned up something that’s even worse than we already know.”

Marc Gunther, author of The House That Roone Built: The Inside Story of ABC News, and now editor-at-large of Guardian Sustainable Business US, agreed with Tompkins.

“I think this is a money-driven decision, and that’s why the six-month suspension makes sense,” Gunther said. “Test the audience, see where he stands in terms of his public perception in six months, make the story go away. And then you can have time to sort of reassess your options.

“I don’t think it’s a firing. I really don’t.”

All sides agreed that a key part of NBC’s calculation will be the performance of Williams’s stand-in, Lester Holt.

“Thinking about it in terms of my other passion, which is baseball: if you can replace a $10m with a $1m player without a dramatic drop in results, why not?” said Gunther. “I would imagine that’s what’s going on: ‘Let’s see how this goes, and if this doesn’t go well, we’ll try to bring him back, and he’ll have paid his sentence.’”

“This is not a small-stakes issue,” Tompkins said. “This is a gigantic, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars question. It’s nothing less than one of the single largest business franchises the company has.”

Williams recently signed a five-year extension of his contract reported by Variety to be worth as much as $10m a year. The success of the nightly newscast, which had been first in the ratings, influences how the news division as a whole fares – and how the network’s local affiliates and NBC’s parent companies do, as well.

Tyndall wrote on Wednesday that there is a certain interchangeability among news anchors, and that Williams’s sudden departure “is not that big a deal” for NBC Nightly News. “If I am right,” he wrote, “this is bad news for Brian Williams and the entire industry of agents and aspirants seeking to pocket their share of the network news divisions’ diminishing revenues.”

NBC itself classified Williams’s punishment as harsh. “His actions are inexcusable and this suspension is severe and appropriate,” NBC Universal CEO Stephen Burke said in a statement Tuesday.

Gunther and Tompkins both noted that Burke’s statement and others stung.

“I just thought the language in the [latest] statements was needlessly harsh,” Gunther said. “I don’t think anyone could say this is just a slap on the wrist. I think he’s been humiliated.”