Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (9 page)

The spurned executives at ABC wondered if one factor that figured into Lauer’s decision was Couric’s appearance as a cohost for a week on
GMA
, starting on Monday, April 2. Her guest stint—she was filling in for Robin Roberts, who was on vacation—had been heavily advertised for four days in advance and had forced
Today
into a defensive position, as demonstrated by the desperate booking of Sarah Palin as counterprogramming. Many people on the staff truly thought
Today
could lose for the first time in sixteen years, and Lauer could see the fear in their eyes. In the end Couric failed to move the Nielsen needle, but ABC’s exercise in stunt-casting showed that as
GMA
mounted its calculated assault on NBC’s winning streak (now at 851 weeks), the network was ready to show a little swagger.

NBC executives denied that the competition played a role in Lauer’s decision, and he didn’t mention Couric when, in a CNN interview on May 30, he discussed his decision to stay put. But he did describe feeling protective of and loyal to an organization that had made him rich and famous. “I think that I have fed off the company trough at NBC for a long time, and I had been the benefactor of great success there,” he said. “Times are harder there right now. I think it’s been well publicized. We are—the show is not where I want it to be right now. The ratings are not where I want them to be.

“I want to make it better,” he continued. “I want to, you know, reinvigorate the show in some ways that perhaps we have, you know, let up on in the past couple of years. And so to leave now seemed like leaving when work needed to be done.” He paused. “I think it would have been a lot easier to leave if we were soaring to new heights, but the competition is tougher. There are a lot of challenges out there and as a result, that just didn’t feel like the right time to leave the people.”

*  *  *

April 5 was visiting day at the Taft School, an exclusive boarding school in Connecticut where Burke’s fourteen-year-old daughter was considering enrolling. Burke was in one of the classrooms, sitting in on one of the classes, when his BlackBerry buzzed. It was Lauer’s agent, Lindner. The day before, April 4, Lauer had called Burke and told him he wanted to stay, and now Lindner needed to hash out the remaining details of the deal. Burke ducked outside and spent the better part of the next six hours on a park bench, cell phone to his ear, while his family members continued the tour. “Dad, you shouldn’t have even come,” his daughter told him afterward. But the deal got done. NBC re-upped its morning MVP.

Then Lauer phoned ABC. For Zucker, it was personal: he had lost the fight with his former network, though in retrospect it might not have been a fight at all. “He was never going to leave NBC,” Zucker said a few months later.

At about six p.m. on the fifth, Capus called
The New York Times
to trumpet his news. “Matt is the franchise, and our franchise player has decided to keep leading our team,” Capus said. Maybe he should have stopped there. But he continued, “Matt always said he would only continue if he could be all-in. The all-in factor was really key. This is a demanding job with a demanding schedule. For him it was a question of lifestyle. As his family is getting older he wants to be able to spend more time with them.” As head-scratching statements go, that one was positively Curry-esque. How could staying on the job lead to more quality time with the kids? The answer: it couldn’t, as Lauer’s wife Annette knew. She was openly disappointed with her husband’s decision. When I brought up the deal to her a few weeks later, she said, somewhat bitterly, “Two more years, and then he’s mine.”

Lauer’s re-upping might have been the ultimate retaliatory stunt by the
Today
show at the end of
GMA
’s brazen Couric Week. But Lauer didn’t want it to come across that way. He thought on-air hoopla about a huge new contract would be detrimental to his regular-guy image. On the April 6
Today
show, opposite Couric’s last day on
GMA
, Lauer’s big announcement was barely teased at all. When it came up at seven fifteen, right after the morning’s news headlines, Lauer started off sheepishly and self-consciously by poking fun at his receding hairline. “Truth be told, I was developing an idea for a new show, where viewers could tune in every morning and see someone they know lose a little more of his hair every single day right in front of their eyes.” But “I thought, ‘I don’t have to do that, I could just stay here and do that!’” Then, knowing that the viewers like nothing more than harmony with their morning grits, he showed the world a serene face. He confirmed that he’d renewed and said, “This is my family. I love this job. I love working with you guys and all the people behind the scenes. I’m excited. Let’s keep going.”

Curry, who had confided to friends that she felt Lauer’s shoulder would only get colder now that he had renewed, wrapped up the segment with one of her signature “Huh?”-inducing sign-offs. “We’re stuck with you for a long time,” she said. “So let’s have some fun.”

The contract renewal was a Brobdingnagian accomplishment for Burke, Capus, Bell, and NBC News as a whole. Lauer’s future had been a frustrating question mark for the better part of two years. The executives felt that the renewal reaffirmed their commitment to real news reporting, in contrast to what they privately called “the crap on
GMA
.” Capus felt he should have been hailed by the press as a fighter for quality and integrity. But reporters didn’t want to talk much about Lauer, except to ask if it was true that his contract contained a “dump Curry” clause. They were onto something; changes were coming. Capus still believed he could stop or at least stall the second phase of Operation Bambi, the elimination of Curry—he was recommending that any change happen at the end of the year, no sooner. December was a logical time, right after the presidential election. But Bell and Burke believed in their Olympics timetable.

Along with the Curry chatter, the
Today
show spokeswoman Megan Kopf had something else to downplay: the price tag on Lauer’s contract. Unlike other TV stars—his former cohost Couric comes to mind—Lauer never wanted anything about his salary known. But anonymous sources with knowledge of his deal did, and they put out a big round number: twenty-five million a year. Kopf swore the number was inaccurate, and at her urging Lauer later started using a quip that they hoped would put a damper on the money talk: “I have not heard anybody come up with the right amount.”

On
Saturday Night Live
that week, Seth Meyers had a better one-liner: “I think the answer to ‘Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?’ might be ‘Buried under strippers and blow.’”

Even if the number was, say, twenty-two million instead of twenty-five million, Lauer was still by far the richest man on morning television, in the history of morning television. Inside ABC there were two reactions to the Lauer deal. One was a tepid little joke that implied, probably rightly, that NBC had to pay Lauer more given the strengthened state of
GMA
and the weakened state of
Today
: “We will await our commission.” The other response took the form of a rhetorical question: How soon, everyone wanted to know, before Ann Curry is gone?

Chapter 5

Denial

On Friday the thirteenth of April, exactly a week after Lauer announced his contract renewal, Jim Bell stopped by Ann Curry’s dressing room. There was, he said, something they needed to discuss. He alluded to a problem of some sort, but he didn’t say what the problem was, or whether it was a trifling matter or something important. With Curry set to go on vacation to California for a week, Bell said—rather cruelly, Curry’s supporters would later maintain, for it was a remark that seemed designed to unsettle the mind and remove the soothing effects of a vacation before they set in—“We need to talk as soon as you get back.”

For all the millions that had been spent to secure Lauer’s services and all the political maneuvering and press-leaking that had transpired since the first of the year, the most difficult part of Operation Bambi—the reverse seduction of Ann Curry—hadn’t started in earnest yet. But it would soon enough.

By April, 2012 had already been a rough year for
Today
. There was the threat from
GMA
and the tension between Bell and Capus. And there was this: in late March the show accidentally but repeatedly broadcast audio clips of the 911 call that George Zimmerman made before shooting and killing seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in a Sanford, Florida, neighborhood. The way the clips were edited distorted Zimmerman’s words grossly, giving them a strikingly racist cast. Since Zimmerman was Hispanic and Martin was African American, the shooting had sparked a national conversation about race, and by editing the tapes
Today
had unnecessarily inflamed it.

The circumstances of the error did not exactly heap glory on the
Today
show’s journalistic standards and practices. The clip was first aired on March 20, in a report by Lilia Luciano, a then-twenty-seven-year-old Miami-based Hispanic correspondent who had been hired by NBC from Telemundo, its Spanish-language sister network, a year earlier, and who had no prior English-language reporting experience. She had been paired with a twentysomething producer whose experience with major news stories was also necessarily limited. In their report Zimmerman’s words to the 911 operator were, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” In fact, Zimmerman told the operator, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” When the dispatcher asked, “OK, and this guy—is he white, black, or Hispanic?” Zimmerman then and only then said, “He looks black.” Similar distortions aired in two other stories later in the month. Conservative Web sites picked up on the misquotation and accused NBC of bias and negligence. The network never even broadcast a correction or an apology.

Some of the criticism aimed at
Today
came from within. Journalists elsewhere at NBC News complained that the morning show was held to a lower standard than the rest of the division. “They are under such colossal pressure from
GMA
that all sorts of things pass muster there that wouldn’t pass muster on
Nightly News
or
Dateline
,” one veteran NBC correspondent said at the time.

Capus ordered an investigation into the 911 tape editing to find out who was at fault, but the findings were never made public. Amid pressure to deal with the mistakes swiftly and harshly, Luciano was let go, the young producer was laid off, and several other producers were given disciplinary letters. The investigation was a further blow to the
Today
show staff’s morale at a time when
GMA
had the ratings momentum and the fate of one cohost was an open question. While Capus was right to rigorously investigate the mistakes made with the Zimmerman tape, his actions were still seen by
Today
staffers as a way to poke around the show, embarrass Bell, and gain leverage over him. One longtime staffer said flatly, “This is Steve’s way to hurt Jim.”

Capus said that was not his motivation. But he could barely conceal his scorn for Bell at a town hall meeting he held in the
Today
show work space on Thursday the twelfth. Trying to provide a bit of the leadership that he believed Bell wasn’t supplying, he spoke at length about the need for quality and accuracy in reporting. “We used to be
The New York Times
. Now we’re the
Daily Mail
,” Capus said, referring to the British tabloid that the morning shows treated as a tip sheet. He wanted that to change. He wanted fewer stories from TMZ and more from NBC’s own reporters. He wanted the staff to cut back on sensationalistic crime stories—no more than one missing person story per day. (When ABC’s James Goldston heard about this, he remarked to an associate, “Good—more missing people stories for me then!”) Wrapping up his speech, Capus repeated the journalism maxim that it’s better to be right than first. “I don’t care if we’re number two if we don’t give up our principles,” he said. The mere mention of falling to second place seemed to make many in the room uneasy.

*  *  *

Curry, by this point, would have to have been as dumb as a second-hour morning show segment not to have realized that something was up with her employment situation. Bell had been minimizing Curry and Lauer’s time together on air, and had Guthrie fill in every time she was away. He had been trashing her in conversations with colleagues. And the leaks had already started.

On a March 13 episode of
TMZ Live
, the gossip kingdom’s daily webcast, TMZ editor Harvey Levin reported that Lauer was on the verge of renewing his contract at NBC. “But,” he added, “there’s something else we know”—something that involved Curry. Twenty-five years before, Levin had worked alongside Curry for a time at KCBS, a Los Angeles TV station, and he said as much on the webcast. “I like Ann,” he said. “Matt does not like Ann so much. I can tell you, it’s well-known in NBC circles, in the building, that he just doesn’t like her. He doesn’t like working with her on the show, you know, whatever they say publicly about it, that’s just the way it is.” Levin didn’t link the ideas of Lauer’s staying and Curry’s possibly leaving. But the on-screen graphic read, “ANN ON CHOPPING BLOCK.”

Two weeks later Gawker ran this headline on its Web site: “Ann Curry Will Be Fired as Co-Host of the
Today Show
Because Everybody Hates Her.” The accompanying report, written by the site’s top editor, A. J. Daulerio, called it a “foregone conclusion” that “once NBC gives Matt Lauer his presumed mega-deal, Ann is as good as gone.” Citing anonymous sources, he said those at the network called Curry “hopeless” and “atrocious” and added that Lauer was “fed up with watching Curry turn what was once NBC’s most charismatic and engaging program into a joyless slog.” The most cutting part of the piece was this passage, written in the snarkily postmodern Gawker style: “‘Everybody knows she’s gone,’ said one source. ‘Everybody knows she’s gone,’ said another. ‘Everybody knows she’s gone,’ said another.” The item, which came complete with a two-minute video of some of Curry’s most embarrassing moments on
Today
—including mispronouncing Benjamin Netanyahu’s name and starting a newscast by saying “Good morning, good morning everybody, in the news this morning, good morning”—scored two hundred thousand page views, making it one of the site’s top stories of the month.