BREAKING: Brian Williams to take himself off the air, temporarily…
News report filed by intrepid reporter John F. Di Leo, 2-7-15, 5pm CST:
We have obtained the full transcript of his report, here. Please read it in full, with great respect for the platoon of reporters who gave their lives in obtaining this hero’s press release before its official publication. Man, those RPG launchers at 30 Rock are LOUD…
Brian Williams, of NBC, Reporting:
I’m taking myself off the air, for the time being, just to give the spin team working on this whole plane story a chance to find me a soft landing.
But I WILL be back… soon… and I want you to know, I’m not gonna take this lying down.
I’m going to spend this entire sabbatical researching myself, to figure out how this happened. I need to find out what it was about my upbringing that caused me to have these minor, tiny, miniscule, lapses of judgment.
Perhaps it was my poor, deprived upbringing… we could never afford a full-sized harp for music class, so I had to make do with a small lyre…
Perhaps it was those years of working my way through grammar school, struggling nights at a textile mill, making up articles out of whole cloth…
Perhaps it was those years of working my way through high school, working weekends and nights at a toy factory, making stuffed animals by stuffing polyfill into narrow tubes of fabric, spending thirty or forty hours a week making up tails…
Perhaps it was all those psych class experiments in college, when they took me out of the creative writing class and used hypnotic regression to draw the experiences of other people out of my mind… so that I would better understand the fact that people would need to be out of their mind to trust anything that ever came out of my mouth…
So anyway, I wish the best of luck to the various fill-in hosts who will be standing in for me during the days when I’m away. I’ll be back soon. I’ll be driving around in my white Bronco, searching high and low, looking for the real killer… of my reputation…
John F. Di Leo
(at this point, I would normally mention the fact that this is fiction, but… Brian Williams never does, so why should I?)
copyright 2015 John F. Di Leo