NBC Fires Matt Lauer

Morning shows have never fit with my lifestyle -- in either work shift I've lived. But I do know it's a part of life for millions.

 

My mother would get me up for school in the mid-70s, and I would crash on the couch trying to get a few extra winks before breakfast was ready. Was impossible to sleep, however, with Today on and Barbara Walters and Gene Shalit droning on in the background.

Does that count?

 

The only time the Today Show or any TV is on in our house before noon is Thanksgiving morning because of my wife and daughter's passionate love for the Macy's parade.

 

I agree with that. I also think it’s naive that people are surprised that people whose jobs are predicated in large part on being megalomaniacial — politicians, Hollywood types, anyone who is on TV — are like this. When’s the first big name at ESPN gonna lose his job? Because you know it’s coming — especially with people losing their jobs there en masse — and I think a lot of people could guess some candidates.

 

When the President of the U.S. does it, the first reaction is shock.

I'll certainly react with shock when other politicians, Hollywood types, TV stars do it, too.

 

I just saw the Shitty Media Men list that's been circulating. Couple of guys on there who present themselves publicly as real champions of women. It's getting really hard to trust anything about anybody.

 

Were Lauer and Rose on it?

 

This is so reminiscent to how shocked people were that baseball players use PED's.

There really isn't much difference between the BBWA and entertainment reporters.

 

I don't know celebrity-beat 'journalists' take themselves as seriously as the baseball writers.
and I don't mean that in snarky way for either.
The fact that baseball writers take themselves seriously is a big part of the reason the baseball HoF is the most meaningful while football and basketball are largely unimportant.

However, if you take yourself seriously, you have to dig into stuff that can be unpleasant, which the baseball writers did not do with regard to PEDs. They still largely want to pretend that it is settled and we all need to 'move on.'

The problem is, with sports reporters and celebrity-news reporters, the people covering these beats require that the audience continue to like and maintain intense interest in the topics/people being covered.
If everyone is cheating and records are meaningless, you potentially alienate your audience and limit you own status and career as a baseball writer.
If everyone in the entertainment industry at all levels is a complete scumbag that audiences refuse to support, those reporters are out of work.

You want to titillate with just enough information about wrongdoing so that the audience can engage as both fans and as critics without exposing the true gravity and enormity of the wrongdoing.

 

I get that a lot of the recent news is cause for self-reflection, both for men and for journalists who write about these people. But I do want to say, at risk of whatever message-board beating I'm about to take—how would you approach this stuff, as a writer?

Say I'm assigned a story on Daniel Radcliffe. (I am literally choosing him because he's the last image of a celebrity I saw, no other reason.) Am I supposed to call everyone he's ever worked with and say, Did he ever sexually assault you or anyone you know? Like, that's a normal question to ask somebody? And what if someone says, "Well, I heard..." So now we take a rumour and try to turn it into something more?

I understand that the "open secret" people are different. That takes a blinder eye to miss. But a lot of these people are surprises. Charlie Rose? Who ever thought for one instant of Charlie Rose having vanilla consensual sex, let alone anything else? Even someone who isn't a surprise, like Tiger Woods—do you think there was some buffet somewhere, where anyone writing about Tiger could go see every fact about his life and choose what to include and what to discard?

If I'd known anything about Tiger's sex life, of course I would have reported it. But that information wasn't readily available. I followed him for weeks once and got none of that, except that he was super secretive. I can't leap from that to: Tiger's fucking everything that moves. Nobody as far as I know talked about that until it finally came out in a torrent. Fold into that libel laws, with the very real danger of a massive, well-financed lawsuit coming down the chute if you fuck something up (hello, Gawker!), these are not simple things to write about.

I'm saying that I understand we are in the middle of a reckoning, and that it's overdue. But it's easy to tut-tut at celebrity journalists here, as it is, with the benefit of hindsight, to complain about the giant miss that was steroids and baseball coverage in 1998. The practical difficulties of reporting and writing such stories, however, are being weirdly overlooked here, at a place where journalists sometimes talk about journalism and how to do it.

 

Why?

Why would you have reported it?

It has been eight years and, to this day, I don't understand why Tiger's sex life was a national news story.

I mean, Christ, is adultery in the crosshairs now? Maybe it is. Where's the current line? Seems like something should at least be civilly or criminally actionable. Or actionable in the workplace. But other than the tabloids, I don't see how someone's legal, though scuzzy, sex life is news fodder. As noted earlier when this came up, MLB players talk openly in the clubhouse - fucking openly - about stepping out. If you work for the Houston Chronicle and you overhear Charlie fucking Morton tell Jose Altuve that he got a little side action in Toronto last trip (I have no idea if Charlie fucking Morton is married. He's an example of a scarcely above-average baseball player), are you obligated to pursue that?

How would anyone know that Tiger and his wife didn't have an open marriage, for example?

God, what a rabbit hole.