NBC News anchor Brian Williams announced he will take a leave of absence from the nightly news broadcast while the network appears to be getting ready to fire him. Brian Williams, acknowledging that the scrutiny and criticism he was attracting was becoming a distraction for his network, said on Saturday that he was stepping aside as anchor of NBC’s “Nightly News” for the next several days. In a memo to the NBC News staff, Mr. Williams said that Lester Holt, the anchor for “Dateline,” would step in as the network dealt with the crisis caused by Mr. Williams’s admission that he had misled the public with an account of a helicopter incident in Iraq. “In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions,” Mr. Williams said in the two-paragraph memo. Mr. Williams is both anchor and managing editor for “NBC...(Read Full Post)