Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV by Brian Stelter Page A

content of the two shows and chastised those who didn’t. “The competition in this case has chosen to do a very different show,” Bell said later in the year. “If you watch them side by side you’ll see. It’s worked for them in the short term. But we’re not going to do anything that’s going to hurt our brand and the legacy of the Today show. We’re going to stick to our knitting and be who we are.”
    Bell stuck to his belief that The Problem was not the time-tested formula—it was the way that formula was executed by Curry. But others began to worry that something bigger was broken. “It’s not Ann,” said one NBC executive at around this time. “Ann ain’t great. But what about the show? GMA is quicker, faster, and smarter.”
    The Today show’s predicament almost seemed straight out of a business school textbook. The brash advertising executive Donny Deutsch, a regular on the show’s panel discussion “ Today ’s Professionals,” told Bell that Today risked being a victim of its own success like General Motors, the automaker that had had nearly 60 percent market share in the 1960s, before Japanese automakers ravaged the business. “GM wasn’t built to compete,” Deutsch said. “Their whole premise was ‘Don’t break anything.’ Then all of a sudden, when they really had to compete, it wasn’t in their DNA. It’s very hard for an enterprise that’s been the dominant market leader to suddenly switch from ‘leadership maintenance’ mode to ‘competitive counterpunch’ mode.”
    Indeed, behind the scenes at Today , the tension seemed to increase daily, especially after Lauer renewed. Lauer was at odds with Bell, Bell’s No. 2 Don Nash, and Noah Kotch, the seven a.m. producer who was known for his fixation on the daily ratings race. Kotch, despite his hard news background as Peter Jennings’s head writer, programmed a disciplined menu of crime, sex, and celebrity scandal in the seven thirty half hour, which Lauer found particularly distasteful (but which morning viewers did not). Kotch’s critics called him the “trash doctor.” The atmosphere became so strained that Kotch started working from home in the mornings, not coming in until Lauer had left the office. Meanwhile Curry was saddled with more of the tabloid segments while Bell assigned Lauer the smarter segments to keep him happy-ish.
    All the while, Operation Bambi was grinding on. Guthrie did her best to dodge the bountiful speculation about her future—and Curry’s. Guthrie’s usual tactic was to say, when asked about the personnel brouhaha, that she knew nothing—which in fact wasn’t all that much of a stretch. Like everyone else, she had seen the Internet reports and heard the hallway whispers, but hadn’t spoken a word about the subject to her NBC bosses. In fact, she’d gone a step further and instructed her agent not to pitch her for the job. She wanted to preserve her relationship with Morales, with whom she cohosted the nine a.m. hour.
    Curry knew only a little bit more than Guthrie. She was processing the spiel about the roving correspondent’s role that Bell had given her at their lunch—and the more she thought about it, the more she could see it for the easy letdown that it was. Sure, it could be touted as something prestigious like Christiane Amanpour’s “foreign affairs anchor” position at ABC. But Amanpour, if you noticed, was barely ever seen on ABC. On television, airtime is oxygen, and leaving Today would be oxygen-depriving. It would be a demotion. Humiliated and angry, she decided she wasn’t going anywhere without a fight. Two weeks after the lunch, on May 9, she sat down for a previously scheduled interview with Ladies’ Home Journal and said something that would later scream to readers, “They forced me out”: “I’ve been at Today for 15 years and I’d love to make it to 20.”
    For Curry it was the relatively little things—starting with Lauer’s growing indifference, after a