I usually watch "Meet the Press" on Sundays, so this week I was interested to see whether they would take up the Brian Williams "ConflateGate" saga ("Did I really save that woman from a burning car, or did I just see it on a video feed from our affiliate in Albuquerque?").

About halfway through the program, host Chuck Todd, with little preamble, presented verbatim Williams' statement of the day before, assisted by large on-screen boards. Then the program went into a commercial break.

I thought it was a missed opportunity of major proportions for the show that bills itself as the nation’s longest-running television series.

mtpOf course, it is difficult to criticize the actions of a colleague or one’s employers on air, but regardless of what Brian Williams did or didn’t do, this was a signal opportunity to examine the role of the broadcast media in American life and what is right or wrong with it. The panel was certainly up to the task, and they might have even brought in Tom Brokaw to do something useful, but NBC passed.

According to Maureen Dowd, this Williams thing has been brewing for a long time, but "there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top," she writes, quoting an NBC News reporter.

And so Williams, as managing editor of his own program, gives himself a hiatus while NBC concocts a fallback plan should he have to resign, according to The New York Times.

I'm not a huge fan of Twitter commentary, but Tina Brown tweeted a particularly insightful and trenchant barb: "Solve Brian Williams' debacle by removing his Managing Editor news title. Time to debunk the myth that anchors are journalists."

Walter Cronkite, who took the managing editor title for himself from print journalism at the nation's second-longest-running television program, the "CBS Evening News," might agree.

But that’s what the gang on "Meet the Press" should have been discussing, together with this provocative observation about Williams in The New York Times: "It may be just one bad apple, but he came out of the system," said Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland who previously worked at NBC News."

Let’s face it: ConflateGate is not really a full-blown crisis—unless you're an NBC or Comcast suit—but "Meet the Press" had a rare chance to cover itself with distinction—if not glory—in the annals of broadcast journalism.

Instead, they just covered themselves.

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Bill Huey is president of Strategic Communications, a corporate communications and marketing consultancy, and author of "Carbon Man," a novel about greed.