It’s been a very tough year for Matt Lauer. The Today Show host has come under extreme fire for how he and NBC fired Ann Curry , while his program has sank to second in the ratings behind Good Morning America . Speaking to The Daily Beast about the departure of his ex-colleague, Lauer admits it didn’t exactly go smoothly. “I don’t think the show and the network handled the transition well,” says Lauer . “You don’t have to be Einstein to know that. It clearly did not help us. We were seen as a family, and we didn’t handle a family matter well.” Today is still struggling to recover, as Lauer says the series has been “kicked around a lot” but a lot of the damage has been “self-inflicted.” Having been the top-rated morning program for 16 years, Today now draws nearly one million fewer households than Good Morning America on a daily basis. What has led to this reversal? “We want people to feel good about a portion of their morning and we got away from that,” Lauer said, adding that much of the darkness is gone, by design.” Lauer concludes, however, that he’s the “luckiest guy I know” and he hopes to use the ratings decline as motivation: “Who’s going to feel sorry for me? Nobody. In some ways being number-two in the ratings is a real shot in the arm, a kick in the pants. It makes you hungrier – I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a fire lit under your ass.”
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Matt Lauer on Ann Curry Firing: We Messed Up
