‘Nightly News’ Goes On Amid Anxiety and Outrage

NEW YORK —  At 5:30 p.m. EDT, NBC News’ third-floor newsroom usually buzzes with intense activity--phones ringing and employees tapping away at computers--as the final hour leading up to the “NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw” begins.

But on Friday, about five hours after NBC employees were told that Brokaw’s 38-year-old assistant had tested positive for cutaneous anthrax, the newsroom sat eerily silent. News that she was expected to recover would come later in the day. Correspondent Bob Arnott reported from the Rockefeller Center site on sister channel MSNBC, with the deserted newsroom behind him.

Brokaw’s show did go on the air. But not from his studio at Rockefeller Center, portions of which had been closed off for investigators, but from the “Today” show set on the ground floor below.

The veteran anchor opened his newscast noting that NBC was in the “unusual and unhappy position of reporting on one of our beloved colleagues, a member of my personal staff, who has contracted a cutaneous anthrax infection.”

He closed it on a highly emotional note, saying: “On behalf of all of us at NBC News and especially on behalf of our friend and colleague, thank you for your concern. She has been, as she always is, a rock and she’s been an inspiration to us all. But this is so unfair and so outrageous and so maddening, it’s beyond my ability to express it in socially acceptable terms. So we’ll just reserve our thoughts and our prayers for our friend and her family.”

It was a sober moment that echoed the mood inside NBC, where most employees learned about the situation in a memo that went out from NBC Chairman Bob Wright and President Andy Lack before noon.

Steve Capus, executive producer of “NBC Nightly News,” said the staff got back to work in the afternoon after most, including Brokaw, were tested for anthrax. Parts of the third-floor work space, including Brokaw’s offices, were shut down, as was the seventh-floor space housing the network’s security operations. Before day’s end, hundreds of employees had lined up to be tested and given preventive doses of the antibiotic Cipro. More will be tested and treated today.

Reporting on one’s own organization proved to be “awkward and we would rather not be in an position to have to do it. It was a difficult day and a difficult broadcast,” according to Capus.

With work farmed out to other NBC bureaus across the country, “the broadcast pretty much resembled what we wanted it to be tonight,” Capus said, but the focus, “wasn’t exactly finely tuned.”

Just as “Tom’s dual roles here as a journalist and as somebody who has very strong feelings for our colleague, I think came through,” he said. Staffers were heartened after hearing she has responded well to the treatment. But he added: “I’m sure she’s shaken to her core, as we all are. It was impossible to set that aside today.”

Fox News Channel employees also learned Friday that the network had received a letter about two weeks ago containing white powder. The assistant who opened it tested negative, sources said.