“Everybody Knew”: Inside the Fall of Today’s Matt Lauer

With the firing yesterday of Matt Lauer, NBC News apparently decided that it needed to clean its own house before other news outlets reported on what "everybody knew" about Lauer's transgressions.  As the repercussions of sexual misconduct roil across the nation - excerpt for in the White House where the molester-in-chief is now denying the accuracy of the Access Hollywood tape he previously admitted to - what is striking is that in most instances the news of the transgressions were known to others before hand , sometimes by many people. Personally, I cannot grasp the mindset of the men involved who due to their positions of power thought they could force themselves on anyone they wanted.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the situation of Lauer which tracts this same pattern (a piece in Variety gives more lurid details here).  Here are excerpts:

For weeks, amidst the deluge of revelations about sexual misconduct by powerful men in media, executives at NBC News had been hearing rumors of stories being reported at Variety and The New York Times about Lauer’s alleged sexual relationships with NBC bookers and producers. Those executives asked Lauer “if there was anything that he thought we should know or could fit into this category, and he adamantly denied that there was.” According to one NBC insider, Lack reported to other top executives that Lauer had denied any sexual impropriety.

Then, on Monday, a woman who had already met with The New York Times, but who wished to remain anonymous, went with her lawyer to meet with representatives from NBC’s human-resources department to lodge a formal complaint about Lauer. According to a person familiar with her complaint, neither “rape” nor “assault” was used in her complaint to NBC. Nevertheless, the complaint was serious and specific enough to result in the firing of NBC News’s biggest star and most powerful figure. The allegation related to an inappropriate sexual relationship that started when the colleagues were covering the Olympics in Sochi.

Lauer had been dogged by stories of infidelity for years, so much so that he had become a regular target of the tabloid press. That focus narrowed his world, according to a former colleague. “His pattern was that of a beleaguered person who was constantly being pursued by The National Enquirer,” the former colleague told me. . . . . “So I think the only place he could really operate was in his office and then when he was on the road. And there was a lot of him bringing attractive young women into his office for counseling and where he would talk to them about their career.” The Variety story about Lauer’s sexual misconduct, published Wednesday, based on the accounts of more than 10 current and former employees, reports that he could lock the door to his office from his desk.

There were, according to the former colleague, two groups of women that Lauer seemed to focus his attention on: interns, pages, and production assistants in charge of running scripts in the morning; and also bookers.

Insiders at NBC remained incredulous that NBC’s top brass was not aware of Lauer’s behavior with women. “The real focus right now should be on this complete disingenuous behavior by NBC to say, ‘I’m shocked,’” one former NBC colleague told me. Lauer has been prized and protected by a succession of NBC News presidents. . . . . “I don’t know what everyone is so surprised by,” said one high-level industry source. “This has been going on for months and months and everybody knew it and it was just going to be which girl came forward, and who reported it first.”

Lauer’s downfall could have been hastened by any number of his current or former colleagues, or at least that was the word inside NBC circles. “There’s a lot of speculation that Megyn Kelly was directly involved in getting women to come forward,” the former colleague told me. Kelly, who reportedly came to NBC with a whopping $23 million package and who has struggled to get traction at 9 a.m., reportedly felt the heat from Lauer’s disapproval, this person said. (An insider close to Kelly disputed both claims.) “Even if she wasn’t going to replace him, he was going to have a shiv in her back any day. You could already see reports of him saying that it was a mistake.”

Similarly, NBC insiders saw the hand of Ann Curry, whom Lauer ousted, in his demise, and possibly even Billy Bush. (Curry and Bush could not be reached for comment.) The repercussions inside NBC are unlikely to stop with Lauer.

As the national reckoning with sexual harassment continues, the question of Lauer’s improprieties looms large over NBC’s editorial decision to pass on Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein. “They were sitting in a glass house and they knew it,” Lauer’s former colleague said.

Matt Lauer’s Gift to Donald Trump

I often complain about the laziness and incompetence of much of the mainstream media.  Indeed, I continue to believe that had the media done its job, the Iraq War might have been avoided. Wednesday night we saw another glaring example of media incompetence when Matt Lauer - whom I have never thought much more than an empty suit - disastrously moderated the supposed forum on national security between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  Based on his performance - which thankfully has been widely condemned - Lauer should never, ever again be allowed to report on anything other than inane fluff pieces on weekday afternoon shows.  Rich Lowry has perhaps the best take down of Lauer and NBC for having a "pretty" faced cretin (I don't even think he's that pretty) moderate a serious forum.   Here are excerpts from Lowry's take down in New York Magazine:

Before Wednesday night’s presidential forum had even ended, reporters and fact-checkers were picking apart Matt Lauer’s failure to challenge Donald Trump’s false statements and attacking the parity of his questions. What should the moderators of the upcoming debates take from this?

The moderator of the first presidential debate on September 26 is Lester Holt — like Matt Lauer, an NBC News anchor. If he arrives onstage as poorly prepared as Lauer, and behaves as boorishly toward Hillary Clinton as Lauer, the first debate, likely to be the most-watched presidential debate in the history of broadcasting, is going to be a debacle for the country.

Much ridicule, all deserved, has been aimed at Lauer’s laughably empty reservoir of facts, particularly when questioning the fact-free Trump. (“Questioning” may be an overstatement in this context; Lauer didn’t question Trump so much as feed him anodyne cues to spew any hooey he wanted.) The most widely panned example of the moderator’s failure is particularly galling: Clinton herself said in the forum’s opening round that Trump was initially in favor of the Iraq War, having said so on Howard Stern’s radio show in 2002. But Lauer didn’t even listen to her. When Trump said just minutes later that he had been against the war from the start — and cited a 2004 Esquire article as proof — Lauer not only failed to challenge the conflict between what he said and the truth cited by Clinton but seemed oblivious to the fact that the Iraq War began in 2003.

And let’s not forget that interlude when Trump was claiming that Vladimir Putin is a superior leader to Barack Obama — an outrageous argument that Lauer never challenged. To prove his point, Trump cited “polls” that give Putin an 82 percent approval rating. What polls? Lauer didn’t ask. I dare say Trump could have cited Chinese polls from the 1960s that gave Mao a 100 percent approval rating, and this moderator would have just nodded and moved on to the next topic on his crib sheet.

Lauer came armed with a lot of follow-up questions about Clinton’s email server — fair enough, if he had also brought along follow-up questions for Trump. But he didn’t. When the former Marine officer and National Book Award–winning author Phil Klay (Redeployment) asked Trump how he’d handle the postwar aftermath of deploying American troops overseas, Lauer (who seemed to have no idea who Klay was) let Trump skate off with a bunch of nonsense about grabbing Iraq’s oil rather than ask a follow-up or permit one from the better-informed Klay.

But the problem here wasn’t just that Clinton was grilled and Trump was not. There was a rudeness to Clinton on Lauer’s part reminiscent of Rick Lazio’s paper-waving performance in his debate with Clinton during the 2000 Senate race in New York. Repeatedly, Lauer nagged Clinton to speed up and keep her answers short — a demand he never made of Trump. And during much of Clinton’s half of the program there was the added distraction of people roaming around in the back of the shot while she was speaking. In Trump’s half, the room seemed still, the visual framing of Trump tightly focused. This subtle shift in presentation was an implicit endorsement of the strategy of Trump’s candidacy: that by acting the role of commander-in-chief with alpha-dog bluster and cartoonish command, he can bamboozle voters into believing that there is some content to go with his performance of “leadership.”

Is Lauer a Trump supporter? I doubt it. But his incompetence and double standard have handed Trump a big post–Labor Day gift just as the polls are tightening.

One may believe that the debate over the Clinton Foundation’s transactions with corporations and potentates seeking entrée to a Clinton State Department or White House is overblown. One may feel the same about the questions surrounding Clinton’s unprofessional and irresponsible handling of her emails. But what is not ambiguous is this: Most Americans, including many Democrats and independents, don’t trust Clinton, and no matter how many examples surface of Trump’s bottomless record of scams and corruption, his malfeasance is not going to translate into more trust for Clinton. She’s going to have to improve her standing by making herself more available to the press and public in unscripted settings and by taking responsibility for her mistakes in human language rather than the lawyerly boilerplate she used again in last night’s forum. In the coming battle over whose supporters turn out on Election Day, she needs voters to feel motivated to vote for her, not just against Trump.

[A]s I first argued in 2014, liberals and Democrats should stop worrying so much about Fox News; its monochromatically white and increasingly geriatric viewership is large (by cable news standards, not overall television standards) but dying off. It is the GOP base, and it will remain loyal to the party even if Fox News were to change its ideological stripes tomorrow or vanish altogether. It’s not too likely that many Americans who don’t watch Fox News might stumble innocently into its confines, watch Sean Hannity, and suddenly become right-wing zealots. Fox is far better at preaching to the converted than making converts out of nonbelievers.

Fox News can’t tilt the 2016 election toward Trump. But as we saw in last night’s farcical forum, NBC News, parent of the liberal-leaning MSNBC, just might do so if it doesn’t get its act together by September 26. 

Lauer epitomizes so much of what is wrong with today's mainstream media.  Perhaps he needs to go back to doing fluff pieces for some backwater local TV market.

Poll: Majority Of Americans Want Supreme Court to OK Same Sex Marriage

In more bad news for the Republican Party, a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll has found that 58% of Americans want the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down state same sex marriage bans nationwide.  Meanwhile, would be GOP presidential contenders are fighting to see which of them can be the most anti-gay and strident in their opposition to marriage equability.  It is indicative of the GOP's branding problem and refusal to accept that the world and society are changing and that trying to drag the country back to the 1950's is a recipe for failure.  Here are highlights from NBC News on the poll findings:

Nearly three in five Americans want to see the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage throughout the United States, according to a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll.

 

A total of 58 percent of Americans said that they favor a high court decision to eliminate bans against same sex marriage, with 44 percent of those saying they strongly favor such a result. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they oppose a court ruling in favor of the case's LGBT plaintiffs, with 29 percent said they strongly oppose it. 

One in five respondents in the poll said that society has gone too far when it comes to accepting homosexuality, while 44 percent said that society has not gone far enough to end discrimination against gays and lesbians.  

Support for a Supreme Court decision that allows nationwide same sex marriage is particularly strong among young voters (73 percent in favor), Democrats (78 percent in favor), Hispanics (71 percent favor) and people with a postgraduate education (69 percent). 

Opposition is high among conservatives (68 percent oppose) and seniors (55 percent oppose). 

In short, the GOP is alienating younger voters, Hispanics and those who are educated and appealing largely to a demographic that is literally dying off.  Not exactly a formula for long term success. 

Bill O’Reilly’s War Lies Exposed - When Will Fox Suspend Him?

With NBC News' Brian Williams on a 6 month suspension, the hypocrisy one hears from other so-called journalists is stunning.  Moreover, if Williams' suspension is justified - I personally don't believe it is - then that same standard needs to be applied across the broadcast spectrum.  If that occurred, of course, every anchor and reporter at Fox News would need to be suspended immediately given the way in which they lie with abandon and rewrite facts and events.  One of the top blowhards at Fox is Bill O'Reilly.  As Salon reports based on an investigation done by Mother Jones, O'Reilly has lied about his war correspondence experiences for years.  Here are excerpts:

NBC News anchor Brian Williams is no longer the only prominent anchor who faces serious credibility questions for misleading the public about his experiences in war zones. In an extensive new investigation, Mother Jones’ David Corn and Daniel Schulman detail how for decades, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has told gripping accounts of his own war reporting that don’t mesh with the facts.

O’Reilly’s tall tales concern his experiences as a CBS News reporter covering the 1982 Falklands War between Great Britain and Argentina, as well as his dispatches from El Salvador’s civil war. The conservative commentator has cited his supposed wartime experiences numerous times as evidence of his journalistic gravitas, as Corn and Schulman document.

O’Reilly also related a tale of his harrowing Argentine experience following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying on air:

I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off, you know, but at the same time, I’m looking around and trying to do my job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was more important.

But Corn and Schulman find crucial inconsistencies between O’Reilly’s stories and the factual record.

[H]his own account of his time in Argentina in his 2001 book, The No Spin Zone, contains no references to O’Reilly experiencing or covering any combat during the Falklands war. . . . .

There is nothing in this memoir indicating that O’Reilly witnessed the fighting between British and Argentine military forces—or that he got anywhere close to the Falkland Islands, which are 300 miles off Argentina’s shore and about 1,200 miles south of Buenos Aires.  

Given the remote location of the war zone—which included the British territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, more than 1,400 miles offshore—few reporters were able to witness and report on the combat that claimed the lives of about 900 Argentine and British troops. The government in London only allowed about 30 British journalists to accompany its military forces. 

American reporters were not on the ground in this distant war zone. “Nobody got to the war zone during the Falklands war,” Susan Zirinsky, a longtime CBS News producer who helped manage the network’s coverage of the war from Buenos Aires, tells Mother Jones. She does not remember what O’Reilly did during his time in Argentina. But she notes that the military junta kept US reporters from reaching the islands: “You weren’t allowed on by the Argentinians. No CBS person got there.”

Longtime CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer corroborates those accounts, telling Mother Jones, ”Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands. I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.”

There's more that is worth a read.  Not surprisingly, O'Reilly has condemned NBC's suspension of Williams.   That said, for all those lauding Williams' suspension, they need to be demanding O'Reilly's suspension - and the suspension of every other journalist who has embellished their experiences as Williams is said to have done.  If that were to happen, I suspect that there would be few anchors left, particularly at Fox News.