Brian Williams in Africa

Standing in the middle of the Louisiana Superdome, anchoring NBC’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina, Brian Williams made it clear in the most humble way possible that he was, indeed, the next great television news anchor. He had taken his crew to the heart of a deadly and dangerous disaster to deliver the news and he somehow managed to balance a straight delivery of the facts with proper human emotion in one of the finest series of reports in television news history.

Mr. Williams, the anchor of the NBC Evening News, is on the road again and the story he reported from Africa this evening was of the highest caliber. He is there with rock star Bono, touring some of the most depressed regions of the continent, as the U2 front man investigates philanthropic progress firsthand.

On his the NBC News blog, The Daily Nightly, Mr. Williams writes with a Mali dateline:

Tomorrow we travel from Mali to Ghana... all of it part of a promised tour by Bono to check up on spending versus need. While he sees more to be optimistic about, it was hard to feel that way while looking into the eyes of children today. As you so often hear on trips like this one -- we all feel the same -- our only frustration is that we cannot scoop them all up in our arms and take them home to share in all that we're so lucky to have in America.

The television broadcast concluded with a heart-wrenching feature on a young girl. Mr. Williams reported:

She couldn’t have been more than seven years old. She had methodically built a fire and has filled a bowl with oil, which was boiling. She then mashed the dough – as she apparently does every day – putting the dough in the oil and cooking up a sizeable meal apparently for her family.

But her eyes told the story of maturity beyond her years. And even though this area is ten hours away from New York by air, this scene illustrated our two different worlds. What was her American equivalent, a girl of seven years of age, doing at that same time this afternoon?

In an era when network news is quickly fading and the thirty-minute evening format teeters on extinction, Mr. Williams continues to offer one final reason why Americans should tune in to his broadcast.