Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Dec. 4 chat here, and submit...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Matt Lauer pauses during a break while filming NBC's "Today" show in 2013. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters) | Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Dec. 4 chat here, and submit questions for the Dec. 11 chat, which will take place at noon instead of the usual 1 p.m., here. This week, a reader wants to know about consequences for tolerating sexual harassment. I’ve edited the question lightly for clarity: Billy Bush’s op-ed in the New York Times confirming that yes Trump did speak the words on the Access Hollywood tape also mentions that the higher-ups at NBC pandered to Trump for years as he was making them so much money. The same has been mentioned about Matt Lauer, that the NBC brass looked the other way as his ratings were high. Will the executives ever be held accountable, or will they stay in the shadows letting only the “talent” take the consequences? Part of the problem with holding executives accountable for long patterns of behavior is asking who should be held accountable. During the years in which Lauer is accused of sexual harassment and assault, and during Trump’s run on “The Apprentice,” NBC had five different presidents: Jeff Zucker, Kevin Reilly, Ben Silverman, Jeff Gaspin, and currently, Robert Greenblatt. Determining appropriate consequences for those men would mean determining what they knew about Lauer’s and Trump’s alleged conduct, when they knew about it, and what, if anything, they did or didn’t do in response. It’s possible that different presidents (not to mention other executives) knew about different allegations, or that one president didn’t brief the next, etc. This is not to say that a thorough investigation can’t answer these questions. It can, and should. And if it emerges that any of these men knew about serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Lauer and Trump and declined to act, their current employers should consider firing them as unfit to supervise large organizations. But it’s also important that we have as clear a picture of what happened at NBC as possible. The truth matters; if lower-level officials at NBC didn’t feel comfortable escalating serious complaints to the president of the network, that’s worth knowing, too. The goal here can’t just be to get big-name talent or big-name executives fired. It has to be to understand the whole culture of an organization in which sexual harassment and assault happened, and in which reporting and punishment didn’t happen swiftly. People who do bad things should be removed from the positions they abused. But real reform is rather more complicated. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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