Matt Lauer, who has co-anchored NBC’s Today Show since 1997 (and appeared as its news anchor for three years before that) has been dismissed from the network amid charges of sexual harassment.
In a memo to staff Wednesday morning, NBC News president Andrew Lack wrote, “On Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer… While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.”
After what Lack called “serious review,” the network opted to terminate Lauer’s employment.
The Today Show Twitter account shared the news shortly after the beginning of Wednesday morning’s program:
The show’s staff apparently learned of Lauer’s firing not much earlier than that. Co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, meteorologist Al Roker, and fill-in co-anchor Hoda Kotb all seemed visibly shaken by the news.
Our president, who is a mature grown-up human being, took to Twitter to gloat about Lauer’s dismissial, which is a totally logical thing to do when you’re a confessed sexual predator. He also asked, “when will the top executives at NBC & Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News.” And, in a follow-up tweet, asked “now that Matt Lauer is gone when will the Fake News practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin? And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the “unsolved mystery” that took place in Florida years ago?”
And that’s all fun, because it’s a reminder that we now have an emotionally unstable, conspiracy theory-peddling narcissist with his finger on the nuclear button – and that his campaign against the first woman nominee from a major political party was covered poorly by men like Lauer, Mark Halperin, and Glenn Thrush, who were all subsequently accused of misogynistic behavior. Hmmm, makes you think!