Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (10 page)

Where did these leaks come from? The answer is not known and may never be for certain, but Bell, according to a colleague, was at that time “really speaking out of school,” criticizing Curry and praising Guthrie. He had even asked a young producer at
Today
to come up with a collection of clips documenting Curry’s gaffes on the air. There was no apparent connection, however, between the blooper reel Bell commissioned and the Gawker video.

Kopf dismissed the talk about Curry’s imminent reassignment as “100 percent gossip,” unfit for print in respectable publications. Which of course it was not. While she issued specious denials, the ratings gap between the Big Two continued to shrink, causing even more stress. And right then, at the very moment NBC News PR needed all the help it could get—we’re talking a fully pimped-out war room with crisis consultants and social media whiz kids and ample handfuls of Snickers and Kit Kats—Kopf’s boss Lauren Kapp left for a job at the Huffington Post. Kapp was not only the best leak-plugger at NBC News, she was Capus’s most trusted advisor and problem-solver. Kapp deserved a lot of the credit for the seamless handoffs from Couric to Vieira in 2006 and, even though this one might have been a mistake, from Vieira to Curry in 2011. But she wouldn’t be around for the next one: Kopf would have to do it all herself.

On the twenty-third, with Bell’s warning that “we need to talk” still on her mind, Curry returned to work and—ill-advisedly, some thought—brought up the ratings in an acceptance speech at the Matrix Awards, an annual ceremony for women in media. In front of hundreds in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel she thanked “the exceptional men I get to work for today,” then added, “I’m not sucking up, even though recent ratings events might dictate that I should.” There was laughter and applause—but also some baffled looks. “What an awkward thing to say,” remarked one male executive in the room. “But that’s Ann Curry in a nutshell.”

Curry may be mistake-prone, but she’s no shrinking violet. The thrust of her speech that day was a critique of the boys’ club that still ruled morning television and network news. “Considering that all my bosses—
all
my bosses”—she struck the podium with her left hand—“have been men, I have wondered what has happened to this hope for full equality in America,” she said. “And I confess, I am weary of still living in a man’s world. And I know I am not alone.” There was applause again. “We are not done.”

Curry said women in the media industry needed a renewed call to “know our worth” and to excel. “If we can close our eyes and just listen,” she said, “we can almost hear the clamor of all these young, talented, smart young women coming up behind us. Cheering us on. Let their hopes and their dreams embolden us.”

*  *  *

At
Today
it was generally agreed that the divide within
its
boys’ club, that is, between Capus and Bell, undermined the show and distracted both executives from putting out a better product. Capus, as we’ve seen, technically had more power—Bell was supposed to report to him—but he was feeling pressure from the man
he
reported to, Burke, as well as from NBC’s affiliates (both its owned-and-operated stations and those owned by other companies were suffering from the
Today
show’s ratings slump), to “do something” before the start of the Olympics. The news division “had to satisfy the growing discontent,” said a person who had read the e-mails and heard the calls from the affiliates.

To the extent that he was involved, Lauer was trying to have it both ways—giving Curry the proverbial cold shoulder but siding with Capus in the sense that he, Lauer, cautioned against making a sudden change against Curry’s will. One confidant of both Lauer and Capus said they were advocating “a more nuanced, patient approach” than Bell was. Another said Lauer’s message could be summed up in four words: “Give her more time.” It wasn’t because Lauer believed in Curry; to the contrary. Viewer research showed that having Curry to Lauer’s left every morning was hurting him. (His Q Score, which was as high as nineteen in 2011, had fallen to fifteen. Curry’s score had sagged, too.) But Lauer suspected that her hasty disappearance would hurt him further. “He was afraid of being blamed,” one of his colleagues said forthrightly, as his best friend Gumbel had been blamed for the Pauley–Norville imbroglio. Gumbel’s reputation arguably never recovered. So Lauer advised his bosses to be careful. “He
does
want Ann gone,” a colleague of Lauer’s said in April, “but he doesn’t want to do it suddenly.” Another colleague later recalled that Lauer said, “Let’s not forget the lessons learned about other transitions.”

While he and Capus advised caution, Bell took action. His Olympics clock was ticking. The week of the Matrix Awards luncheon, Bell took Curry to lunch at La Grenouille, one of his favorites, on Fifty-Second Street. Seated at what Zagat calls “the last (and best) of NYC’s great classic French restaurants,” they polished off two bottles of wine (Bell had the yeoman’s share) and discussed The Problem, as he saw it, with the show: that Curry was “out of position.” At some point fairly early in the meal he mentioned his solution: a new roving correspondent role for her, something better suited to her reportorial interests than
Today
. Bell reaffirmed his commitment to the kinds of overseas stories Curry had covered with such success in the past. To him, Bell said, trying to turn up the charm, Curry-as-roving-correspondent was not just a step toward better journalism, it was also a great way to brand
Today
as a serious show committed to important but oft-neglected stories. He may have even shared with Curry his pipe dream of trying to win for her the title of United Nations goodwill ambassador, a role she would share with Angelina Jolie, whom Curry had repeatedly interviewed about humanitarian issues.

It’s worth noting here that many television journalists would have jumped at the once-in-a-career chance that was on the table. A pricey ticket, paid for by somebody else, to travel the country and the world! But the correspondent position was, of course, also a face-saving way for Curry to drop out of daily participation in an endeavor at which she was failing. As one person with ties to NBC put it, “They’ll pretend Ann wants to go back to ‘newsy news.’”

Although Curry was stunned by some of what she heard, the lavish lunch ended more or less amicably, with Bell proposing that she give some serious thought to the possibility he’d outlined. “I thought I’d gotten her halfway there,” he later told colleagues.

*  *  *

As it turned out, he hadn’t. Later, Bell’s own colleagues would ridicule both his technique and his optimism. “At age fifty-four, she’d finally reached the top. This was never going to be Ann’s idea,” said one colleague who’d spent decades at NBC. Another colleague, one who viewed Curry with disdain, said “she had a huge sense of entitlement. She thought it was a Supreme Court appointment.” Maybe—but to be fair, Couric and Vieira
had
held on to the chair as long as they’d wanted.

For all sorts of reasons, Curry was tough to reverse-seduce. Start with the fact that she had no agent. (After Alfred Geller died, she toyed with signing up with someone new but decided not to; she wanted to keep sending her commissions to his family.) Nor did she have a business manager or lawyer. This put Bell at a disadvantage: he had no one else to go to, no one else to bring into the conversation about her future. Looking back on Operation Bambi, NBC executives would conclude that her lack of representation had been a well-considered choice. Curry would look back and think her lack of representation had been a tactical failure, for it left her without a legal defender until it was too late.

Bell’s belief that Curry was responsible for the ongoing ratings slippage was bolstered the week of their La Grenouille lunch. The week before, when Guthrie filled in for Curry,
Today
had had a strong week; when Curry came back from vacation,
GMA
had a strong week. While the weak numbers were objective fact, Curry would not cop to being their cause. She saw lame content—a daily diet of dubious fashion trends and equally dubious celebrity gossip—as the main explanation for the
Today
show’s decline. As she told Capus, “Jim Bell has to fix this show.”

Lauer did not disagree with her on this important point. In March, as he contemplated whether to stay or go, Lauer had confessed to a colleague that he felt the weight of the whole network on his shoulders—that in lieu of new ideas, NBC was relying on his talent and charisma. “There’s more pressure on me now than there ever has been,” he’d said. “They’re relying on
Today
to prop up the whole network. If we fail…” He’d trailed off, leaving the consequences of failure unspoken. Lauer, like Curry and Capus, felt that the show needed a harder news bent. They both bemoaned their producers’ use of TMZ and the British tabloid the
Daily Mail
for story ideas. But the stories the producers borrowed/stole about sensational murders and family feuds and shark attacks—one or two degrees shy of “trashy,” the word they tagged
GMA
with—were the stories that tended to rate highest in the minute-by-minute ratings. They were staples of morning TV. Thus the
Today
family sometimes had its own feuds when Lauer called in to the office some afternoons and asked the senior producers what was in the next morning’s “rundown,” the second-by-second schedule of what will happen on the show. Lauer dismissed stories he didn’t like (he particularly disliked the shark attack stories, staffers said) as “not relevant” to the audience at home. There are few places in midtown Manhattan more uncomfortable than the receiving end of that phone call.

Lauer knew that his involvement in story selection rankled some producers. But he wanted to resist pandering to the audience the way he thought
GMA
too often did. Whenever the ratings “tighten up, there is a little bit of a reaction to the other people—and I don’t like it,” Lauer told me in late April.

While Bell took issue with Lauer and Curry’s views of how newsy a morning show should be—he was a strong believer in the traditional mix of serious and soft segments that had always been a hallmark of
Today
—he and his cohosts were united in their disdain for
GMA
. Bell called it a “freak show.” Like Lauer, he frequently cautioned his staff not to get distracted by the competition, though that was much easier said than not done. He was proud of the quality of
Today
—the live shots from foreign countries, the better-living segments with financial experts, the kinds of stories he didn’t see on
GMA
. He encouraged reporters to compare the content of the two shows and chastised those who didn’t. “The competition in this case has chosen to do a very different show,” Bell said later in the year. “If you watch them side by side you’ll see. It’s worked for them in the short term. But we’re not going to do anything that’s going to hurt our brand and the legacy of the
Today
show. We’re going to stick to our knitting and be who we are.”

Bell stuck to his belief that The Problem was not the time-tested formula—it was the way that formula was executed by Curry. But others began to worry that something bigger was broken. “It’s not Ann,” said one NBC executive at around this time. “Ann ain’t great. But what about the show?
GMA
is quicker, faster, and smarter.”

The
Today
show’s predicament almost seemed straight out of a business school textbook. The brash advertising executive Donny Deutsch, a regular on the show’s panel discussion “
Today
’s Professionals,” told Bell that
Today
risked being a victim of its own success like General Motors, the automaker that had had nearly 60 percent market share in the 1960s, before Japanese automakers ravaged the business. “GM wasn’t built to compete,” Deutsch said. “Their whole premise was ‘Don’t break anything.’ Then all of a sudden, when they really had to compete, it wasn’t in their DNA. It’s very hard for an enterprise that’s been the dominant market leader to suddenly switch from ‘leadership maintenance’ mode to ‘competitive counterpunch’ mode.”

Indeed, behind the scenes at
Today
, the tension seemed to increase daily, especially after Lauer renewed. Lauer was at odds with Bell, Bell’s No. 2 Don Nash, and Noah Kotch, the seven a.m. producer who was known for his fixation on the daily ratings race. Kotch, despite his hard news background as Peter Jennings’s head writer, programmed a disciplined menu of crime, sex, and celebrity scandal in the seven thirty half hour, which Lauer found particularly distasteful (but which morning viewers did not). Kotch’s critics called him the “trash doctor.” The atmosphere became so strained that Kotch started working from home in the mornings, not coming in until Lauer had left the office. Meanwhile Curry was saddled with more of the tabloid segments while Bell assigned Lauer the smarter segments to keep him happy-ish.

All the while, Operation Bambi was grinding on. Guthrie did her best to dodge the bountiful speculation about her future—and Curry’s. Guthrie’s usual tactic was to say, when asked about the personnel brouhaha, that she knew nothing—which in fact wasn’t all that much of a stretch. Like everyone else, she had seen the Internet reports and heard the hallway whispers, but hadn’t spoken a word about the subject to her NBC bosses. In fact, she’d gone a step further and instructed her agent not to pitch her for the job. She wanted to preserve her relationship with Morales, with whom she cohosted the nine a.m. hour.

Curry knew only a little bit more than Guthrie. She was processing the spiel about the roving correspondent’s role that Bell had given her at their lunch—and the more she thought about it, the more she could see it for the easy letdown that it was. Sure, it could be touted as something prestigious like Christiane Amanpour’s “foreign affairs anchor” position at ABC. But Amanpour, if you noticed, was barely ever seen on ABC. On television, airtime is oxygen, and leaving
Today
would be oxygen-depriving. It would be a demotion. Humiliated and angry, she decided she wasn’t going anywhere without a fight. Two weeks after the lunch, on May 9, she sat down for a previously scheduled interview with
Ladies’ Home Journal
and said something that would later scream to readers, “They forced me out”: “I’ve been at
Today
for 15 years and I’d love to make it to 20.”