US morning television host Matt Lauer’s cultivated image of a trusted, charming newsman was shattered on Wednesday, when he became the latest powerful media figure to be swept up in the cascade of allegations of sexual misconduct.
Lauer was a pillar of NBC, which on Wednesday announced that it had terminated the longtime Today show anchor after receiving “a detailed complaint” about the 59-year-old’s sexual behavior in the workplace.
Popular for balancing serious news reporting with morning news silliness, Lauer had previously survived minor dents to his reputation in two decades as host of Today at NBC, which granted him a two-year, $20m a year contract in 2016.
“He is more of an entertainer than a news gatherer, but at the Today Show he assembled a large following,” Mark Feldstein, a media professor at the University of Maryland who worked for 20 years on TV news including at NBC, told the Guardian.
Feldstein, who is writing a book on scandals in the media which he is having to update given the recent spate of sexual harassment allegations, said that Lauer’s position within NBC grew all the more powerful in recent years given the cash-making importance of morning news shows. “I have to believe their evidence against Lauer was very compelling to have taken such drastic and rapid action,” he said.
Millions of Americans’ worldviews were partially shaped by Lauer, who since January 1997 anchored Today’s 7am to 11am programming block with a rotating cast of hosts. The show mixes traditional morning fodder like cooking demonstrations with hard-edged reports that are regularly cycled into primetime news.
A work day for Lauer could involve dressing as Pamela Anderson on Baywatch for the 2013 Halloween episode or pushing George W Bush to explain the use of secret interrogation sites abroad in an Oval Office interview.
It was Lauer and Katie Couric, his co-host from 1997 to 2006, who many turned to on the morning of 9/11. Today broadcast live footage of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center as the hosts struggled to understand what was happening five miles from the newsroom. “It was a very bizarre scene inside the studio because we’re all justifiably terrified of what was happening,” Lauer said five years later.
In the 2013 book Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter wrote about Lauer’s longtime hold on morning television.
“Men fantasized about being him; women fantasized about sleeping with him (surely some of those men did, too),” Stelter wrote. “To an entire generation of aspiring television journalists, he represented the pinnacle, the peak of the profession.”
But Lauer’s reign at Today was occasionally tarnished by awkward incidents.
There was his interview with actor Anne Hathaway, one day after paparazzi snapped an upskirt photo of her while she exited a car. “Seen a lot of you lately,” Lauer said at the beginning of an interview about the film Les Miserables in December 2012.
And earlier that year, Couric disclosed Lauer’s most annoying habit. “He pinches me on the ass a lot,” Couric told Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen in June 2012.
Many Today fans were furious with Lauer after he was credited with ending the Today show career of beloved co-host Ann Curry. “Curry felt that the boys’ club atmosphere behind the scenes at Today undermined her from the start, and she told friends that her final months were a form of professional torture,” Stelter wrote.
In a segment marking her exit from the show in 2012, the journalist turned away from Lauer’s attempted kiss. TMZ reported that people screamed at Lauer on the streets after Curry’s departure.
Lauer also received heaps of criticism because of his handling of a presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in September 2016.
Clinton, who in 1998 famously told Lauer there was a “vast rightwing conspiracy” against her and her husband, criticized the journalist in her new memoir What Happened. “Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush. What a waste of time,” Clinton wrote.
The NBC News chairman, Andy Lack, said in a statement that Lauer’s termination was a response to the first complaint about his behavior. “We were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident,” Lack said.
NBC’s announcement pre-empted stories in the works at Variety and other newspapers.
Elizabeth Wagmeister, a reporter at Variety, said on Wednesday she had been working on an article about Lauer for months and NBC knew about her reporting. “There are multiple women we’ve spoken to with far-ranging accusations against Lauer,” Wagmeister wrote on Twitter.
Ari Wilkenfeld, a civil rights lawyer, told the New York Times he represented the woman who made the complaint to NBC, but declined to publicly identify her. Wilkenfeld said he and his client met with NBC on Monday for an interview. “Our impression at this point is that NBC acted quickly, as all companies should, when confronted with credible allegations of sexual misconduct in the workplace,” he said.
Lauer, a New York City native, worked for three years as a news reader before becoming Today show host – a job that would send him around the world to cover landmark news events and profile interesting places in his segment Where in the World is Matt Lauer. He has hosted Olympic Games opening ceremonies and has been the host of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for two decades.
The father of three’s first of two marriages ended in divorce. He has been married to model Annette Roque since 1998.
Savannah Guthrie, who worked alongside Lauer on the Today show, said the program was “devastated” before describing the personal impact of the news.
“We are grappling with a dilemma that so many people have faced these past few weeks. How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly,” Guthrie said. “And I don’t know the answer to that.”