(Update: 10:37am: BW spoke to Bauder on Wednesday, two days before Malzberg.) "Until your phone call, I had not realized the anniversary was upon me," Brian Williams told David Bauder in a Sunday Associated Press piece about the NBC Nightly News anchor's six-month anniversary.

On Friday, in a conversation on Bill Bennett's Salem Radio network show "Morning in America," this is what Williams told substitute host Steve Malzberg:

"On my way out of the house this morning, my wife reminded me, 'it's been six months and 6 months of hard work and you made it.'"

Williams' first months at the anchor desk have been out of the ordinary. He told Malzberg:

"The surprising thing that happened of course, I don't think I competed against Dan and Peter head to head, apples to apples, for more than a month before we had a shakeup in the industry. It's a very strange feeling, someone recently asked me, how it feels to be the dean of network anchors, and I cringed. It's like saying the Empire State Building is the tallest building in New York. It's for all the wrong reasons. It's by default. I would much rather be competing head to head and in Peter's case, it will be better when Peter is back in that chair."

> And: "I am thrilled with where we are, and, like any tough, cyclical business, it's about the long haul," BW tells the AP...