If, on Wednesday morning, you had risen early enough and rejoined thetorrid, infinite march that is Twitter, you might have firstlearned of NBC’s termination of its morning-news lodestar, Matt Lauer,through neutral channels. At 6:52 A.M., the Times’s mediacolumnist, Jim Rutenberg, tweeted, “BREAK: NBC Matt Lauer fired,inappropriate workplace behavior. . .story to come.” But, at 7 A.M.,the “Today in New York” warmup ended, the friendly corporate bellschimed, and the “Today” show, as it has since 1952, started.The minutes in between were a chasm.
Stills of Lauer—bespectacled and reviewing notes in one, professoriallyinquisitive in another—crossed the screen as the voice of his co-anchor,Savannah Guthrie, announced the breaking news that Lauer’s employmenthad been terminated overnight, after an employee had come forward onMonday “reporting behavior in violation of our company’s standards.”Guthrie’s voice trembled as the camera captured the tableau—Guthrie andher guest co-anchor, Hoda Kotb, palpably sombre, the Popsicle-orange“Today” show logo floating between them. Guthrie clasped Kotb’s hand.She read the entirety of a statement from the NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack,which was composed in the corporate “we”: “we” had reason to believethat the employee’s complaint wasn’t an isolated incident; “we weredeeply saddened by this turn of events”; “we will face it together as anews organization—and do it in as transparent a manner as we can.” ThenGuthrie and Kotb offered their personal expressions of shock and dismay.Lauer had been loved by so many; “we” loved him. “As I’m sure you canimagine, we are devastated,” Guthrie said. “We’re trying to process itand make sense of it, and it’ll take some time for that,” Kotb said.Expressions of disorientation not dissimilar from expressions ofmourning continued for the rest of the show. As Rebecca Traisterwrote earlier this month, a “powerful white man losing a job is a death.”
We have witnessed a theatre of accountability insidiously refine itself,quite quickly, in the past few months. Louis C.K.’s statement, forexample, following the exposé in the Times of his sexual harassment offemale comics, was not as passionate as, but was more coherent than,Harvey Weinstein’s ramblings about Jay-Z and the gun lobby. Theopportunistic finesse of Kevin Spacey’s coming-out certainly trippedsome social alarms, but he nonetheless garnered some sympathy. Powerbrokers like the Pixar animation baron John Lasseter have even scoopedlong-labored-over articles by preëmpting them altogether. (Lasseter istaking a six-month leave of absence.) No display was savvier than NBC’sorchestration on Wednesday.
The “Today” show’s artful transposition of grief where there wouldnaturally be scrutiny continued into the 10 A.M. slot, in which theveteran host Kathie Lee Gifford spoke of how much she, too, loved Lauerand how sad she was. It continued on this morning’s program, with Guthrie andKotb again at the helm. Not since Bill Cosby—or Bill O’Reilly, dependingon one’s television diet—has the scourge of sexual assault so acutelyinfiltrated the righteous perimeter of the American home. (PresidentTrump, also affiliated with NBC and accused of assaulting women, neverquite depended on a family-man image.) The influence of abehind-the-scenes figure like Weinstein can feel diffuse, removed fromour everyday cultural consumption; Lauer was, and is, synonymous withthe family feel of “Today.” Part of this comes from the network’sbloated investment in Lauer—he reportedly earns between twenty million and twenty-five million dollars a year. (In 2014, a source told Page Six that thecompany chartered helicopter rides for Lauer from his Hamptons compoundto its Rockefeller Center studios at his request.) When, in 1996, Lauer wrestedthe anchor chair from Bryant Gumbel, gossip magazines swooned over hisgeometric jaw and feathery hair; twenty years later, he was transformingcomfortably into a smug but wise paternal figure. His tenure at the“Today” show was the longest in its history. Now instances of Lauer’spublic pettiness toward women seem like the exertions of a holisticallyawful campaign. In 2012, he admonished the actress Anne Hathaway forphotographs that the paparazzi had taken of her exiting a car. “Seen a lot ofyou lately,” he said. And, famously, Lauer was an architect of“Operation Bambi,” a plan that succeeded in getting his former co-anchorAnn Curry fired from the show that same year. (“ ‘Chemistry,’ intelevision history, generally means the man does not want to work withthe woman,” Curry said, according to Brian Stelter’s insider anatomy,“Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV.”) On herfinal show, Curry wept and Lauer pretended to soothe her. His interviewof Hillary Clinton last year was intrusive and aggressive when comparedwith his handling of Trump. How a man thinks of women dictates how heworks with them.
The stakes with Lauer, as with Charlie Rose, who was fired from both CBSand PBS last week, for sexual harassment, threaten the geniality andsocial integrity that are the trade of the morning-show apparatus. And soit is no surprise that, to convey something like moral mooring to avastly female audience, the networks rely on women anchors to break thepublic fall. An ether of remorse already fogs the perception of Lauer’sousting, though Lauer waited a day to issue a statement and in it said,“Some of what is being said about me is untrue or mischaracterized, butthere is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed andashamed.” It seems likely that, at least when it comes to the fact ofLauer’s firing, Guthrie had truly been caught off guard. The company,however, wasn’t; reporters at Variety and the Times had spent monthsinvestigating claims against Lauer. Guthrie’s vulnerable pose conferredan unearned armament to a company that had employed a reckless man fortwo decades. The woman anchor’s surprise becomes the network’s surprise;her sorrow, its sorrow. “How do you reconcile your love for someone withthe revelation that they behaved badly?” Guthrie asked, her eyes glassy.For her, and for Gayle King, who asked a similar question when reportingon her co-host Rose’s transgressions last week, on CBS, the question ofloyalty may be relevant. (It was Lauer who lobbied for Guthrie’sco-anchorship, in 2012, following the success of “Operation Bambi.”) Butneither love nor loyalty nor sadness excuses NBC, the company thatpassed on its own employee’s reportage of Weinstein’s abuse of women.The Variety report on Lauer, published on Wednesday afternoon, included accounts of harassmentfrom three unnamed women. It showed an emboldened player whose harmfulwiles were accommodated by the network around him. The news mediates thenews.
One detail from Ramin Setoodeh and Elizabeth Wagmeister’s reporting in Variety mentions a contraption, apparently common in the offices of executives of his stature, that in this context sounds like something used by a villain from a Bond film. The installation of a button under Lauer’s desk made it possible for him to lock himself, and anyone else who might have been invited into his office, inside, without getting up from his seat. The Times reported that NBC on Wednesday had received at least two more complaints from employees about Lauer’s behavior. One woman told the Times that Lauer locked her in his office in 2001: “She said the anchor then stepped out from behind his desk, pulled down her pants, bent her over a chair and had intercourse with her.” She passed out and was taken to a nurse by Lauer’s assistant. Reading the article, I wondered who had seen that commotion, and I thought about the lock, an instrument of security turned into an instrument of violence.
