Shield your eyes! Read no further! The Washingtonian magazine has revealed some really ugly behind the scenes turmoil and backstabbings that accompained the departure of David Gregory from Meet The Press last summer. The revelations could be too much of a shock for some of you to endure. If the shock doesn't terminate you, suffocation from uncontrollable laughing at NBC's absurd antics could finish you off.
If you dare to read on, you will find out that Chuck Todd was hardly a modest shrinking violet when it came to replacing David Gregory. In fact, he had been clawing for that job since the moment Tim Russert passed away over six years ago. Todd's fervor was matched by that of Joe Scarborough who also coveted that position. These are but two of the Washingtonian revelations about Meet The Press. There are many other juicy tidbits such as the fact that OWS supporter Al Sharpton was hired primarily to enable a corporate merger at NBC. But more on that later as we join the description of Chuck Todd desperately grasping to replace Tim Russert the instant he died in 2008:
...Todd also pined for the moderator’s chair—and lobbied aggressively for it. “He saw himself as the heir,” says the former senior NBC executive, and “let it be known that he was the one that Tim Russert wanted.”
Alas for my fellow former Miamian, it was not to be...yet:
But choosing Todd had drawbacks. He was 36 then and had been on the air only a short time. Despite all Todd’s jockeying, the former executive says the network only briefly considered him—the brass believed he was simply too raw for such a high-profile position.
Gregory, the network’s chief White House correspondent, on the other hand, was a solid, safe choice. Silver-haired and striking, he was an accomplished broadcaster who had a rapport with the officials he covered—George W. Bush nicknamed him “Stretch,” on account of his six-foot-five frame—but who was also known for his confrontational exchanges with White House spokesmen.
Things went sort of well for Stretch until the Dark Force of Comcast entered the scene:
NBC was owned by General Electric at that time, and the network was the oddball of the conglomerate’s industrial empire, accounting for only a tenth of its revenue. Although corporate leaders at GE knew little about broadcasting, they thought of Meet the Press as a hot property, former NBC executives say, and occasionally summoned Russert and other on-air personalities to GE board meetings to impress investors.
...In 2009, it announced it would sell a controlling stake in NBC Universal to Comcast, the Philadelphia-based cable behemoth. NBC was struggling at the time: The network had dropped to fourth place in the ratings overall, behind CBS, ABC, and even Fox. But Comcast CEO Brian Roberts believed that to succeed in the 21st-century media landscape, the cable company needed to do more than control the distribution of TV—it needed to control the making of the content, too. Comcast already owned E!, the Style network, and a couple of cable sports stations. NBC was to be its biggest prize yet.
Before we get to the fall of Stretch Gregory, let us take a look at how a corporate merger enabled the rise of that humble man of the people, Al Sharpton:
To rally political support for the merger, Comcast’s political-action committee handed out campaign cash, and Cohen worked to head off the concerns over diversity. Between 2008 and 2010, Comcast’s corporate foundation donated more than $3 million to 39 minority groups that wrote letters to federal regulators in support of the NBC deal. Comcast and NBC Universal also worked out an agreement with advocacy groups guaranteeing increased “minority participation in news and public affairs programming”—so long as the deal went through. And in 2009 and 2010, Comcast gave $155,000 to an organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who ended up endorsing the merger.
The campaign paid off. In January 2011, Washington approved the deal. One week later, NBC signed Cohen’s old boss, Ed Rendell, to an on-air contract. At MSNBC, which Comcast also owns, Sharpton landed a talk show. A spokeswoman for Comcast says the company is a “long-standing supporter” of minority groups and had nothing to do with Sharpton’s hiring. She also says Cohen played “little to no role” in securing Rendell’s contract.
As we continue laughing over that Comcast denial about influencing Sharpton's hiring, let us find out that what was great for Reverend Al turned out to be not a very good deal for our beloved Stretch:
Before Comcast came along in 2011, David Gregory thrived at Meet the Press. Top White House officials returned his phone calls and took the time to explain complicated policy matters, Gregory’s friends say. Leading figures in business and politics helped him craft questions. “He loved it,” says a close friend.
Huh? His questions were crafted for him by outside interests? And how many of those crafted questions originated with conservative sources? My guess is somewhere between nil and none. Now back to Der Untergang of our soon to be besieged Stretch:
Gregory could be prickly: condescending to lower-level staff and arrogant to others, traits that didn’t make him terribly popular at the bureau. And he wasn’t a good ambassador for Meet the Press on NBC’s other platforms. While Russert had regularly provided political analysis on Today and Nightly News, Gregory appeared on those shows less frequently. He had long been seen as a top contender to replace Matt Lauer as host of Today, and some saw network rivalries as the problem. “Brian Williams and Matt Lauer didn’t put [Gregory] on their shows because they were threatened by him and didn’t like him,” says a former senior NBC executive. Another source familiar with the situation contends that NBC shows didn’t book Gregory because he was rarely around. A person close to Gregory disputes this, saying he was “always around.”
By early 2013, NBC—which had now been under Comcast’s control for two years—began a concerted effort to revive Meet the Press. The network hired a New York branding firm, Elastic Strategy, to organize a series of focus groups to help diagnose the show’s problems, according to people familiar with the research. There was one key finding: Viewers liked Gregory well enough; they just didn’t feel they really knew him.
...Nothing worked. In August 2013, Meet the Press’s ratings plummeted to 21-year lows.
Do we hear a distant trumpet from across the pond? Could it be the cavalry arriving to save the ailing Stretch? The good news is that the cavalry in the form of a new NBC president arrived. The bad news for Stretch was that she put him out of his misery with some not so subtle backstabbings:
To turn things around, NBC hired an executive named Deborah Turness as its new president, making her the first-ever woman to run a network news division in America. Turness had been the editor of the news unit at the British network ITV, but she wasn’t your average television suit. The Englishwoman “renowned for ripping up the rule book,” according to the Guardian, had been married to a former roadie for the Clash and once competed in the “Peking to Paris” off-road car race. She had swagger.
As soon as she arrived, Turness was repeatedly asked if she was going to can Gregory.
According to executives, she did have a mandate to “transform” the whole news division. As she told the New York Times, “NBC News hadn’t kept up with the times in all sorts of ways, for maybe 15 years.” It had, she said, “gone to sleep.”
At the risk of your humble correspondent seeming to be unable to give up the search for his White Whale, I once again bring up another Turness promise reported by the New York Times:
Her new vision for “Meet the Press” includes adding a regular panel of journalists who will question guests, something of a return to the venerable show’s original format.
We await this promised change to Meet The Press in 5...4...3...2... And while we continue waiting and waiting and waiting for this to happen, back to the sad Stretch saga:
She considered bringing in a studio audience, as you’d see on Ellen or Saturday Night Live. She thought about moving the show to New York City, where the number-two-rated This Week sometimes filmed. She suggested that Gregory stack newspapers on his desk to give the set an intimate, coffeehouse feel. She insisted on quickening the show’s pace with shorter interviews and more pretaped segments to mix things up.
How about a pile of VHS movies placed on his desk for that traditional old timey feel?
And she pressed the staff to book more politically active celebrities that non-white, non-male, non-senior citizens—the people who aren’t watching Meet the Press—might be drawn in by.
Gregory chafed at these changes, people close to him say, fearing they were too radical and would cheapen the brand. But he complied. On one show, rapper will.i.am joined former White House communications director Anita Dunn, Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz, columnist Kathleen Parker, and Chuck Todd for the roundtable segment. Instead of loose, as Turness wanted, the result was utterly stiff.
So, will.i.am, what is your opinion of Dodd Frank? The Quantitative Easing by the Federal Reserve? Okay, forget all that. What's the latest dish on Beyonce?
At one point, Turness suggested that Gregory have a live band close out the show to commemorate the death of Nelson Mandela. Gregory was appalled, people close to him say. Although he recognized the need to broaden the program’s appeal to a younger, more diverse audience, he worried that Turness’s approach was about to turn Meet the Press into a political gong show.
How about Peter Pan flying around the Meet The Press set on wires to commemorate the victory of nepotism in live musical TV productions?
Suddenly, stories about the palace intrigue at Meet the Press began appearing with suspicious frequency. By March 2014, only two months into Turness’s turnaround effort, rumors that Gregory was on the chopping block had gained so much traction that he asked NBC to respond and quell them.
“I cannot be more declarative about David—[he] is our guy, is going to be our guy, and we are really happy with him,” Turness’s top lieutenant told the Huffington Post.
Translation: "Stretch is a dead duck who doesn't know it yet."
Gregory was becoming a spectacle, and it was clear to him, friends say, that this was no accident—someone was planting these stories in the press to discredit him. The question was who.
Do we really need to call in Sherlock Holmes to find the source?
Gregory had no shortage of rivals at NBC, and speculation centered on the two who were represented by powerful and media-savvy agents: Joe Scarborough, a client of Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood superagent and the inspiration for Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage, and Todd, a client of Jay Sures at United Talent Agency.
Scarborough, the Republican congressman turned MSNBC talking head and host of Morning Joe, had been after Gregory’s job for years, according to former NBC employees. And inside MSNBC’s New York offices, Scarborough is known as a prima donna who doesn’t respond well to “no.”
“He constantly clashes with [MSNBC president] Phil Griffin,” says a former NBC employee. “There are times when he would just not even talk to [Griffin].”
When Gregory was in the hot seat, some thought Scarborough reached for the knives. And the staff wouldn’t have welcomed him in the moderator’s chair. In 2012, NBC executives had given Scarborough a shot at guest-hosting Meet the Press in Gregory’s absence, according to sources. But the network’s news division protested. Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum was booked for that week’s show, and letting Scarborough interview a fellow conservative would undercut the franchise’s nonpartisan bona fides. As a compromise, Savannah Guthrie moderated and Scarborough led the roundtable.
GASP! A conservative interviewing a conservative! And of course, a liberal host never interviews liberals. Such an event is unheard of.
Under the harsh glare of the press, Gregory’s relationship with Turness crumbled. She told colleagues that the show’s guest lineup still lacked ambition and creativity, and she took more control of the program. Sometimes on Fridays, she would contact the staff to say that the guests booked for Sunday weren’t suitable, forcing Gregory’s team to scramble to find replacements, according to people close to him.
John McCain seems to be on permanent speed dial standby for such situations.
By late July, NBC had made up its mind, according to people familiar with these discussions. The show’s ratings remained awful, and all the negative press was hurting the brand. Gregory had to go.
But NBC was so worried about more leaks that executives kept the decision a secret from everyone—including Gregory—while they began gaming out a replacement.
Turness looked at candidates inside and outside the network and considered choices both conventional and unconventional. She even met with Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s wildly successful Daily Show, who could have brought with him legions of young viewers and embodied the transformation Turness was hired to engineer. “I’m sure part of them was thinking, ‘Why don’t we just make it a variety show?’ ” Stewart told Rolling Stone.
My personal choice would have been Joel McHale from The Soup.
Turness’s secret didn’t last long. Page Six at the New York Post soon declared: “David Gregory’s time on Meet the Press is almost up.”
This time, when Gregory asked NBC to stick up for him, he didn’t get the response he expected. Instead, the network told his agent the bad news: He was out. Now it just needed to figure out how much the separation was going to cost.
After several days of negotiations, Gregory and NBC still couldn’t agree on their final terms. That’s when Gregory found himself driving through the New Hampshire mountains, suffering one final embarrassment as host of Meet the Press.
"Hi Stretch! Deb here. Drop dead! Love ya! Bye!"
Only one year after arriving at NBC with plans to overhaul the news division, Turness tossed her ambitions aside and made the safest choice possible. In the end, she installed Chuck Todd, the ultimate incarnation of Washington’s talking-head establishment.
On Sunday, September 7, a slimmed-down and newly tanned Todd interviewed President Obama for his first show as moderator. The program attracted its largest audience in six months, earning NBC a hard-fought ratings win. The following week, Meet the Press fell back to third place. It hasn’t returned to the top since.
Oops! Maybe Joel McHale as MTP host might not be such a bad idea.
