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| Howard Kurtz |
“It clearly did not help us. We were seen as a family, and
we didn’t handle a family matter well.”
That is an understatement. Sources familiar with the process
say that Lauer repeatedly tried to convince his bosses to slow things down and
give Curry more time before she was pushed into a reduced role.
“When Matt was informed that we had made this decision, his
good counsel was to go slow, to take care of Ann, and to do the right things,”
says Steve Capus, who stepped down last month as NBC News president. “He was
quietly and publicly a supporter of Ann’s throughout the entire process. It is
unfair that Matt has shouldered an undue amount of blame for a decision he
disagreed with.”
At the outset, though, Kurtz writes Lauer would have preferred to anchor with someone else. Before Curry was formally promoted to co-host in 2011, Lauer quietly reached out to an old friend. He asked Katie Couric if she would be willing to return to Today, where they had ruled the time period for nearly a decade.
Couric was receptive to the idea. She was shopping a
syndicated show, and she and Lauer were talking about doing the show together.
Their plan was to sell the daytime program to NBC and feature Couric on Today
during the year and a half until the show could get on the air and Lauer would
be contractually free to join her. Couric could be a Today co-host, perhaps as
part of a troika with Curry, who had already been offered the job. NBC
executives debated the plan, but Burke rejected it after concluding that the
syndicated show would be too expensive to produce. Couric teamed up with ABC
instead.
Howard Kurtz is The Daily Beast and Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief,
and writes the Spin Cycle blog. He also hosts CNN’s weekly media program
Reliable Sources on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET.
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