According to Nielsen ratings, about 13 million people on average watch one of the three network morning shows. That’s 10 million fewer viewers than tune in to the evening news on those three networks. From 2008 to the pres­ent, Today has lost 17 percent of its viewers. As you would expect, the viewers who have disappeared are the younger and more affluent ones, the very people most valuable to the advertising community. (Today still has a younger and more affluent audience than its primary rival, Good Morning America.) The most surprising thing may be that the decline isn’t greater, given the proliferation of other news and entertainment sources. For a significant portion of the audience, Today is as much a habit as it is a news source. But, for all the slippage, the morning-show format remains the last gasp of daily mass appeal. There’s real­ly nothing else like it in the culture.

Lauer at Skibo Castle, in Dornoch, Scotland, 2002. From NBC NewsWire/Getty Images.

Mean Streak?

And because it remains a mass phenomenon, what happens on these shows—and inside them—is highly visible. As a household name, Lauer is more recognizable than any other active TV news personality. Like most news organizations, NBC News recoils when it is actually the subject of news reports. But in recent years the news division of NBC has generated headlines for all the wrong reasons.

There was the animosity between Lauer and Ann Curry; the fabulism on the part of former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams; and, most recently, the greatest October surprise in recent memory, inadvertently courtesy of a short-lived and now departed Today co-host, Billy Bush. Throughout, Lauer has emerged unscathed. One former NBC executive explained that the reason Lauer is both untouched and always rewarded—too big to fail—is that he pretty much has to be: “If Matt Lauer dropped dead tomorrow, there is no heir apparent, and that is why Matt can drive the price of what they pay him.”

Potential threats always seem to get moved out of the way. “The most dangerous seat in television news,” one industry insider told me, “seems to be next to Matt Lauer.”

For NBC, the Ann Curry ouster was terrifying—not because it resulted in Ann Curry leaving Today but because it surfaced an apparent mean streak in Lauer that viewers had never known about. And once they saw it, it was hard to get them to unsee it.

The episode was outlined in Brian Stelter’s definitive 2013 book, Top of the Morning. Before becoming Today’s co-anchor, in 2011, Curry had served for years as the program’s newsreader. She was curious about international news and came across as both serious and empathetic. After Katie Couric stepped down, NBC News put Meredith Vieira, not Curry, in Couric’s old chair. Curry was wounded, but she was promised the job when Vieira left. Vieira, a former host of ABC’s The View, could chat easily with Lauer on-air—and held the job at Today for five years. Curry never established the same sort of connection. Ratings declined, and Lauer’s irritation with Curry was evident, both inside the company and to viewers.

After Curry’s departure, Lauer, his new co-host, Savannah Guthrie, and Al Roker were interviewing the women’s Olympic rowing team about a famous rowing tradition, which involves tossing a teammate in the water immediately after a race. “The tradition here in New York is, you throw her in the Hudson River,” Lauer said, to laughter from the crowd assembled outside Rockefeller Center. Roker chimed in, “Which is different than our tradition, which is to throw one of us under the bus.”

Lauer with Ann Curry, 2012. By Peter Kramer/NBC Newswire/Getty Images.

The Curry story was just one unhappy episode out of many. A more recent controversy intersected with national politics in a way no one could ignore—threatening to derail Donald Trump’s presidential campaign while at the same time generating blowback that NBC had to confront. The stage was set last year when Today’s Natalie Morales moved to Los Angeles to anchor the NBC program Access Hollywood. That shift in the lineup created a morning-show vacancy that was filled by former Access Hollywood co-anchor Billy Bush, a first cousin of George W. Bush and Jeb Bush. Headlines surrounding his arrival at Today last August, in the Post and elsewhere, hinted that Bush was being shunned by his new colleagues because he was seen as a “frat guy” and not worthy of the Today-show pedigree. One reason he may have been greeted with hostility is that he epitomized the idea of Today as primarily an entertainment vehicle—a notion that may be largely true but that is also psychologically resisted. “The problem is that these news divisions are really tricky places and have strong cultures,” a former NBC executive told me. “Anyone who comes in who doesn’t have the news chops gets hammered.”