Veteran TV news anchor Brian Williams will host a late night news program for MSNBC beginning Sept. 6.
The series, The 11th Hour With Brian Williams, will provide a “unique” look at the major political stories of the day, will be the first regularly scheduled show for the former ‘NBC Nightly News’ anchor on MSNBC since he joined the network a year ago.
The series is scheduled to run between Labor Day and the November Presidential election, said MSNBC.
Last year Williams lost his NBC Nightly News anchor slot after inaccurately recalling a story from the Iraq war in which he claimed he was on a helicopter that was shot at by ground fire.
“This new assignment is a natural extension of the hundreds of hours of political coverage Brian has anchored through this campaign cycle so far,” said MSNBC President Phil Griffin in a statement. “He and Rachel Maddow and the team have been great on the big nights, and now he’ll build on MSNBC’s primetime momentum by taking us live into the 11pm hour every night.”
MSNBC, bolstered by its Summer Olympics programming as well as its coverage of the 2016 Presidential campaign, finished the summer averaging 1.1 million viewers in primetime, up 86% compared to summer 2015, according to Nielsen.
