newyorker | We have witnessed a theatre of accountability insidiously refine itself,
quite quickly, in the past few months. Louis C.K.’s statement, for
example, following the exposé in the Times of his sexual harassment of
female comics, was not as passionate as, but was more coherent than,
Harvey Weinstein’s ramblings about Jay-Z and the gun lobby. The
opportunistic finesse of Kevin Spacey’s coming-out certainly tripped
some social alarms, but he nonetheless garnered some sympathy. Power
brokers like the Pixar animation baron John Lasseter have even scooped
long-labored-over articles by preëmpting them altogether. (Lasseter is
taking a six-month leave of absence.) No display was savvier than NBC’s
orchestration on Wednesday.
The “Today” show’s artful transposition of grief where there would
naturally be scrutiny continued into the 10 A.M.
slot, in which the
veteran host Kathie Lee Gifford spoke of how much she, too, loved Lauer
and how sad she was. It continued on this morning’s program, with
Guthrie and
Kotb again at the helm. Not since Bill Cosby—or Bill O’Reilly, depending
on one’s television diet—has the scourge of sexual assault so acutely
infiltrated the righteous perimeter of the American home. (President
Trump, also affiliated with NBC and accused of assaulting women, never
quite depended on a family-man image.) The influence of a
behind-the-scenes figure like Weinstein can feel diffuse, removed from
our everyday cultural consumption; Lauer was, and is, synonymous with
the family feel of “Today.” Part of this comes from the network’s
bloated investment in Lauer—he reportedly earns between twenty million
and twenty-five million dollars a year. (In 2014, a source told Page Six
that the
company chartered helicopter rides for Lauer from his Hamptons compound
to its Rockefeller Center studios at his request.) When, in 1996, Lauer
wrested
the anchor chair from Bryant Gumbel, gossip magazines swooned over his
geometric jaw and feathery hair; twenty years later, he was transforming
comfortably into a smug but wise paternal figure. His tenure at the
“Today” show was the longest in its history. Now instances of Lauer’s
public pettiness toward women seem like the exertions of a holistically
awful campaign. In 2012, he admonished the actress Anne Hathaway for
photographs that the paparazzi had taken of her exiting a car. “Seen a
lot of
you lately,” he said. And, famously, Lauer was an architect of
“Operation Bambi,” a plan that succeeded in getting his former co-anchor
Ann Curry fired from the show that same year. (“ ‘Chemistry,’ in
television history, generally means the man does not want to work with
the woman,” Curry said, according to Brian Stelter’s insider anatomy,
“Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV.”) On her
final show, Curry wept and Lauer pretended to soothe her. His interview
of Hillary Clinton last year was intrusive and aggressive when compared
with his handling of Trump. How a man thinks of women dictates how he
works with them.
