MSNBC Staff Once Chanted ‘F*ck Brian Williams!’ for His Anti-Cable News Report

While NBC’s decision to dump Brian Williams on MSNBC has been widely criticized by media-watchers, we haven’t yet heard from actual MSNBC staffers on the matter. But according to Page Six, MSNBC staff once chanted “Fuck Brian Williams!” at a party, as a rallying cry against a report he did bashing the state of cable news.

For a 2012 segment of Williams’ short-lived newsmagazine show Rock Center, Ted Koppel and Williams described an industry that is “corrosive and does nothing to help compromise in this country.”

At one point, Williams asked Koppel whether “any of this splashed up against what we do?” To which his veteran correspondent replied: “What works about cable television is it’s cheap and it makes a ton of money. There is nothing cheaper than a bunch of talking heads. The people who hire those talking heads have discovered the more irascible, the more partisan, the nastier they are, the bigger an audience.”

Apparently the segment rubbed many at NBC’s cable news outlet the wrong way, per Page Six:

“The rank and file at MSNBC were furious at Brian,” a source told Page Six. “They hated it so much they were still mad about it months later at the office Christmas party.” That’s where some cheered “f - - k Brian Williams” — “It was like a rallying cry,” our source said.

An MSNBC source insisted, “The piece was a few years ago. Stirring it up today, it sounds like the chatter of nervous competitors.”

Watch a portion of that 2012 report below, via NBC News:

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