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Gillette had filed a modest human interest feature about Gurbst, a 20-year fixture in ABC News management, who was leaving the rough-and-tumble world of network journalism for the personal fulfillment of offering guidance counseling to high school students. Gillette rounded out his item with this feelgood quote from Jonathan Banner, executive producer of ABC World News: "She has spent immense amounts of time and patience counseling all of us, helping us through lots of difficult times and giving us advice on what to do. I can only imagine how lucky every child will be who someday walks into her office for advice."
Well, all hell broke loose.
It turned out that Banner's appraisal of Gurbst's people skills was controversial, to say the least. Flooding into the Comments came dozens of ABC Newsers past and present, mostly posting anonymously, to paint an alternate picture of Gurbst--her cliquishness, sycophancy, gossipmongering, vindictiveness, snobbery, sexual obsession, backstabbing and manipulation. Some accusations, if they happened to be untrue, would cross over into outright libel.
"Banner was one of her pets from his days as a desk assistant," claimed anotherformerABCer, for example, describing the onetime Vice President of News Coverage and World News senior producer. "She'd swoon over the men she considered handsome and anoint them stars. The women who usually made the cut were blonde. She'd dismiss people who hadn't gone to the 'right' schools, who didn't have the 'look' she liked or whose personalities didn't click with her dish-the-dirt approach to life."
"She has not only ruined careers but she has ruined lives"--Abclongtimer.
"She created a climate of fear at ABC News"--journalism101.
"…a deranged despot, shoving her particularly destructive brand of cronyism…"--AnonNewser.
"…the poisonous atmosphere she helped create…"--mediaman.
"…Gurbst's career has been defined by character assassination and petty revenge"--tipster2000.
"…an environment of sickening nepotism…"--yosemitesam.
Commenters named correspondent Dan Harris and anchor George Stephanopoulos as Gurbst favorites; correspondents Steve Osunsami and Neal Karlinsky and anchor Elizabeth Vargas not so much. "She backed the wrong side in the anchor wars of 2005-2010," dished abcobserver, referring to the ABC World News succession following the untimely death of Peter Jennings.
Almost all of the commenters refused to identify themselves, a fact that usually undermines the credibility of scathing attacks of this nature. This turned out to be one of the few pieces of evidence in Gurbst's defense. It was a problem Opionabc, for example, acknowledged: "Clearly the dozens of testimonials (most of them spelled properly and written eloquently) are telling and accurate." SomethingSmells asserted that "there is an air of authenticity about the criticisms; they are specific and detailed."
Several posters were aware that their anonymity was undercutting their credibility and offered the whistleblower's explanation for hiding behind a nom d'Internet. "Why, you ask, do we not name ourselves here?" asked ABCNow. "Are you aware of the atmosphere of terror at ABC now?" NYnewshound555 argued that names were being withheld not out of cowardice but because "it reflects the climate of fear that still permeates at ABC News." whiporwill named five current ABC News executives who still serve as "the heirs and enforcers of the Code of Mimi." And terrifiedabcer asserted that Gurbst's protégés were not only "deeply entrenched and in power" at ABC News but had also "established a firm beachhead" at CBS News: "Only speak out if you don't mind never eating lunch on the West Side again."
The sarcastic troll-like insults that one is accustomed to reading in online comments were almost entirely absent. "In all the comments I have read on blogs and other unaffiliated Internet sites these are the most heartfelt, well written and in some cases documented I have ever seen," asserted itsabouttime. desk44 likened the testimony to "when a country's embassy offers a condolence book for people to sign after a major disaster." callmestunned compared the thread to a "truth and reconciliation panel. Who knew a week ago when this started that so much truth--and pain, anger, anguish and sadly vitriol--would come forth?"
Richard Gizbert, a London-based correspondent who was fired by Gurbst and sued ABC News, was one of the few to comment under his own name. He now anchors The Listening Post, a media monitoring show for al-Jazeera English. "The problem with much of the writing we see in comment sections or even blogs is that it tends to consist of uninformed opinion from untrained and sometimes barely literate writers. This strand is most def not that." Personally, I found Gizbert's description persuasive.
Then, half way through the thread, the comments took an interesting turn. The focus turned away from the ad feminam attacks on Gurbst herself, to a discussion of ABC News in general. The tone turned from anger to sorrow, from resentment to resignation. Gurbst was "an appalling person who a dysfunctional leadership allowed to run amok and make a mockery of Human Resources rules," conceded Tone Deaf but "they are all sideshows." Little by little, the thread turned to the long slow decline of ABC News' newsgathering clout and audience size since the glory days of Roone Arledge. David Westin, who now sits in Arledge's chair as president of the news division, has just completed a series of budget cuts that led to the elimination of an entire quarter of its personnel.
It is interesting that of the myriad complaints about Gurbst, very few concerned her journalistic judgment over a 20 year career--botching an assignment for Hurricane Katrina, disdaining the Rwanda genocide, under-resourcing Bob Woodruff's fateful Iraq coverage. Almost all concerned her management of personnel. When it came to the decline of ABC News as a journalistic institution, Westin was held responsible. "ABC's leadership has been bankrupt for years," therealdeal asserted. "Mimi is an unsavory symptom of a formerly great news organization reaching senescence."
intimidation reflected on the "painful, horrible job cuts", calling them "the strongest piece of leadership in years, resulting from years of non-leadership." exabcertoo disagreed, viewing Westin's cutbacks as a continuation of his mismanagement: "It's shocking that the brunt of the 300+ cuts were made to the meat of the company--producers, AP's and PA's who actually labor day in and day out to get the stories on the air." muggedbyreality saw the cuts casting out the "integral hardworking part of the operation" while leaving "highly salaried useless people…feeding off the carcass of the once-great ABC News."
This public airing of the news division's dirty laundry may have been precipitated by Gillette's article. Yet, surely, it would not have happened sans Westin's cutbacks. This willingness, finally and unprecedentedly, to go public, even if anonymously, is a symptom of a collapse of morale at a once disciplined institution. So Gurbst bore the brunt of insults; but ABC News itself was the true target. "The special sickness of ABC News has always been a mix of dilettantism and sadism," kafka generalized, describing its management tradition: "Good work happened despite them."
In this telling, the Golden Age of ABC News--Arledge's age of Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel and David Brinkley and Barbara Walters and Sam Donaldson--was not an era of efficiency that preceded the current one of mismanagement. Instead, it was an age that was so flush with cash, with the oligopoly profits pre-cable, that the cultures of personal destruction and cutting edge newsgathering could exist simultaneously. "Yes, Roone created a multi-headed monster, with shows, anchors, producers and executives who constantly battled," beenthere reminded us. "But somehow the product managed to be the industry's gold standard." FormerABCNewswriter offered the historical perspective that "even in my day ABC had a toxic undertow which Roone worsened--enabling bullying behavior by macho male executive producers. I think Mimi had plenty of negative role models to emulate."
Salacious gossip aside, the significance of this avalanche of abuse against a lone wannabe high school guidance counselor seems to be this. In its pomp, ABC News had so many resources that it could afford to be personally petty and vindictive internally while at the same time broadcasting a product to be proud of. Over the decades, as ABC News has had to retrench, it should have been that the first to suffer cuts were the counterproductive, the excessive, the self-serving, the empire builders--with newsgathering hurt as a last resort. The consensus of this thread makes Gurbst stand as Exhibit A that the opposite has happened.
It is an irony that Gurbst plays this role only because she, too, is on her way out.
What I find disappointing about this thread is its underlying wishful thinking. The rage against Gurbst herself and, by extension, against management as a whole, seems to blind commenters to the fact that it is not some executive failure that is at root responsible for the decline of the prestige of ABC News--the wish that, somehow, all this could have been prevented if only the suits had made better decisions. Well, that is not true. Broadcast television as a whole is in secular decline. This decline has exposed corrupt and counterproductive management practices that prosperity had masked. By fixating so passionately on abuses in the executive ranks, this thread has been unable to visualize a viable, post-broadcast future for ABC News. Such a future has to be mapped out at the corporate level, one tier above president Westin.
It turns out that Westin's rationale for his budget cuts--if not their execution--happens to be correct. They were ordered to change the cost structure of a news division that had been organized for the world of broadcast television and that must now prepare for a world of online videostreams, a world in which the audience shifts from mass to niche and in which product is distributed via social networks not broadcast networks. Successful correspondents at ABC News understand this imperative and are acting on it already. White House correspondent Jake Tapper, for example, knows he not only has to report but to blog too, and to tweet, and to reach out to other journalists to help his fact-checking. therealdeal scoffed that "digital" is the "new euphemism for younger, cheaper, knows less" but "digital" is also the real world too.
Even if Gurbst had been an inspirational leader to the entire cadre at ABC News, not just Banner and her clique, that would not have changed these underlying forces. Even if Westin had made all the right anchor succession decisions at World News and This Week and Good Morning America, their audiences would still have declined.
The truth is that broadcast television alone has become too narrow a platform to sustain a world class news division. ABC News is no longer competing with just CBS News and NBC News but with CNN and npr and The New York Times and the BBC and Reuters and News Corp and so on. ABC News, once a third of a mass media oligopoly, is now a small contestant, with a shrinking audience, in a multi-competitor business, awash with overcapacity.
ABC anchor Diane Sawyer seemed to be putting out feelers to a cable television rival last week by crediting Bloomberg News' Alexis Leondis for Bianna Golodryga's feature on female executives at Fortune 500 corporations and Leondis' colleague Jesse Drucker for Ron Claiborne's expose of corporate tax avoidance. For its part, Bloomberg News has shown a willingness to diversify beyond its specialist financial base into the so-called old media, including the purchase of the magazine Business Week and a partnership with the newspaper San Francisco Chronicle.
To be sure, ABC News' future depends on switching from broadcast to digital but it also depends on forming alliances so that its newsgathering can be rationalized and its product becomes available on as many platforms as possible. The executives at Disney clearly recognized this phenomenon when they decided that ABC Sports could no longer stand alone and folded its broadcast operation into the ESPN cable brand. The sooner ABC News makes an equivalent deal with Bloomberg News the better.
I am a former senior level manager at ABC News. There needs to be an investigation here. There were numerous illegal and unethical practices that I had witnessed throughout my years there. Not only was there theft and questionable accounting practices within my department, but, there was also a culture of fear against reporting anyone that was in favor with Westin, Mimi, Phyllis, Amy and company.
I hope that congress, the fcc, and other journalists will take the time to realize that this isn't just venting from those laid off. I left about 6 years ago and things were already a mess. Disney is a publicly traded company, questionable employment practices were not foreign to us as managers, and our public is being done a disservice by those controlling the way America gets its news.
If a mainstream respected journalist saw fit to run with this, I'd strongly consider going on the record with my names and dates and witnesses.
Drug use and distribution in the workplace, spying, blackmail, theft, fraud, favoritism, sexism, racism, nepitism.... well reported to senior levels and ignored!
All true, no hyperbole!
Sounds like Gurbst is leaving one high school job for another.
For millions of workers across America, the kind of infighting and ugly politics seen at ABC are daily fare in their own 9-5, but without any of the prestige or pay that comes with working at a major news network.
If the snakes in the snakepit had risen up like this fighting for matters of journalistic integrity- against 911 lies, the fake WMDs, illegal bailouts, whitewashing torture, the commonweal etc instead of just over how their egos and career ambitions were stymied-
THAT WOULD BE NEWS. As it is, ABC apparatchiks are in the same category as government propaganda agents, so their whining may get little sympathy from the customers/viewers they have swindled, betrayed and defrauded over the years with their corporate "reporting". The audience has shoved corp media buraeucrats aside after dismissing them for what they are- another corrupt appendage of The Elite/NWO that is out for itself.
Tar balls are now in the loop current traveling up the east coast, the global econ is near detonation, and ABC and its other MSM corp peers are busily promoting another M.E. oil war that could lead to a nuclear calamity, (when they're not pimping the latest soft porn trash-as-news).
This amateur on the internet has more to offer on that subject than you. You, MSM are Totally Irrelevant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOkPGnaXsg8&feature=player_embedded
Mr. Tyndall is right. David Westin and even Bob Iger, are not responsible for the increasingly competitive world leading to the smaller market shares ABC News and other traditional broadcasters struggle to maintain.
Where they (and I include the leadership of other networks here too) have grossly failed as managers, and where that failure in other industries would have at the very least resulted in a public act of contrition, if not dismissal, is in their inability to reposition their talent-packed companies for a brave new world.
This did not happen overnight. This is the result of years of mismanagement, incompetence, and downright stupidity.
What broadcaster has asked employees how they could save money- or get more product for their buck? (After all, it's the employees who are in the field, spending that money. They're the witnesses to anchor profligacy, endless and endlessly expensive satellite bookings, stupid and costly decisions- the list really does go on).
What broadcast executive, dare we say since Roone Arledge (who had his faults- the origin of that culture at ABC is one of them) actually has a vision of what would bring people to the table?
Who decided pandering to the lowest common denominator and celebrity-obsession was the way to maintain audience hunger?
As budgets have shrunk (though let us be clear- never in the executive suite), our world- the world we bring our audience every night- has shrunk too- a kind of diabolical self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no money for reporting trips. There is a shocking lack of interest in covering international events- and that includes America's ongoing two hot wars. There is little money for investigative work. Most nights, looking at the on-air product, it is no wonder those broadcasts have become irrelevant. And that 'digi-journo' business? It really is about young, cheap and ignorant- the suits still don't get what the digital world is about- and that is compelling content. Will a marriage wit
Andrew makes many valid points, especially about the dwindling relevancy of the evening newscasts. Seriously, why is their a need to wait until 6:30PM to see the news on a broadcast network when cable and the internet have all breaking news events 24/7? Broadcast news has to reinvent itself to stay competitive . . . and that doesn't mean giving anchors twitter accounts.
Sure, there are disgruntled employees at other companies but when is the last time eight pages of complaints were posted on a website for one division of a company? And so many more written but not posted out of fear of retribution from the mean-spirited daggers of the fifth floor? When is someone from the west coast going to step in and make changes? Remove Westin and undo his damage by hiring back the people who really did make a difference, insert life back into this lifeless news organization. We're all waiting for someone to stand up to the anchors and demand a salary cut. What could be more ridiculous than paying an anchor millions to read a teleprompter for 30-minutes! At least Brian is in first place and Katie contributes to 60 Minutes. Why not combine the fifth floor responsibilities into a few people. The very fat at the top of the company are the very same people making these inept decisions when it should have been the people who were doing all of the work and yet, not getting treated fairly because they weren't part of the in group. Ridiculous way to run a company and, as we can all see, it's resulted in a loss of revenue. That's what happens when you have inefficient people running a divison.
"I am a former senior level manager at ABC News. There needs to be an investigation here. There were numerous illegal and unethical practices that I had witnessed throughout my years there."
SENIOR LEVEL??
You took the inflated paychek and title you fool. It was YOUR JOB and LEGAL OBLIGATION as SENIOR authority to do the managing and halt the illegality. Why didnt you do it? YOU WERE THE PROBLEM. So you could go along to get along. If there is an investigation, it should begin by indicting those in top management- like yourself- whose negligence and malfeasance in witnessing illegal practices and allowing them to continue while doing nothing, makes you an accessory and LIABLE.
Yet you get on here and claim to be another victim?
Unbelievable!
"By fixating so passionately on abuses in the executive ranks, this thread has been unable to visualize a viable, post-broadcast future for ABC News. Such a future has to be mapped out at the corporate level, one tier above president Westin."
Tyndall does a decent job of summarizing some of the main points of the commenters. But his criticism of the posters as seen in the above paragraph is unwarranted. These posters were discussing the toxic working environment surrounding Gurbst, her protectors, and her toadies--not the general decline in television news and what changes are needed to stay to work with the rise of new media and technology. I didn't really see anyone claiming that the toxic environment was the sole cause of decline in ABC News, just that it was an important contribution factor in some cases.
I didn't really see anyone claiming that the toxic environment was the sole cause of decline in ABC News...
@Dave C--
You are right. No one cited it as a "sole cause." What struck me was the way in which the two phenomena--a toxic personnel policy & the decline in clout--existed side by side in the thread, with little inquiry into how, or whether, they were interrelated. In addition, there was a shift in focus from the initial "toxic working environment surrounding Gurbst" to a series of (mis)management decisions made by Westin.
My conclusion was that the relationship was not one of cause and effect; rather I read this unprecedented public airing of normally internal matters as a symptom of that decline.
So that was the reason I chose to frame my discussion in the wider context...to make sure that symptoms are not confused with causes.
I agree with much of what you write Mr. Tyndall but I do think it is important to remind your readers that ABC News had a plan in place (and had hired personnel) to start 24/7 cable news operation in the mid-90s.
That plan was killed by ABC's corporate executives who, as I understood it at the time, did not want to invest the $100 million over five years it was estimated launching a cable network would cost. Without a reasonable return on investment guaranteed --- or perhaps any return for many years --- corporate ABC killed the cable network, and, I would argue sealed ABC News' future with that decision.
For those who don't recall, this was no fly-by-night idea: the day the ABC announced the planned network was not to be was the first day of work for at least one of the newly hired cable anchors, who, if I recall correctly, learned of her fate when she showed up for her first day of work in the Los Angeles News Bureau.
As a former ABC News employee, looking at what MSNBC has made possible for NBC News, it's hard not to wonder what ABC News would look like today if ABC's leaders had a different vision for the future and a willingness to invest a $100 million or so in ABC News a decade and half ago.
Regards.
David Eaton
ABC News 1984-2007
@David Eaton --
You say "corporate ABC killed the cable network." Was that Cap Cities or Disney?
Andrew:
Either or both -- if I recall the date correctly, what I describe happened in 1996, the year Disney purchased CapCities/ABC. The president/COO of CapCities/ABC became the president of ABC.
David -- my memory needs refreshing here. Was the cancelation of the cable news channel a precondition of the sale? Is it true that Disney wanted either sports (ESPN) or news on cable but not both?
Andrew -- I do not know. Folks at my level (news bureau management) weren't included in those types of discussion. I do recall hearing that Disney valued ESPN very highly -- perhaps worth as much as 1/2 to 2/3 of the $19 billion price for CapCities. Clearly that was a smart decision. I also recall discussions among my bureau colleagues about whether there was room for another cable TV network. CNN existed, MSNBC began in '96 and there were more than few of us wondering if there was enough audience for a third all news cable network. Whether killing ABC News on cable was a precondition or a result of the CapCities sale, I simply do not know.
The above ABC cable network, which had gone quite far in terms of engineering planning, we were about to sign the space lease, was the second one. In the 80s there was an ABC cable news network (SNC ?), which as I recall was shut down by Goldensen. It turned out that Turner was about to pull the plug and if ABC had stayed on would have had the field to itself.
Anonymous says, "If a mainstream respected journalist saw fit to run with this, I'd strongly consider going on the record with my names and dates and witnesses.
Drug use and distribution in the workplace, spying, blackmail, theft, fraud, favoritism, sexism, racism, nepitism.... well reported to senior levels and ignored!"
Perhaps i don't qualify as "mainstream respected journalist," but my media reports reach more than a hundred thousand people, and I broke a story last March about Bloomberg's interest in buying ABC News:
http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/2010/03/25/union-busting-bloomberg-sale-looming-at-abc-news/
I'd be happy to hear more and then post about your allegations of "Drug use and distribution in the workplace, spying, blackmail, theft, fraud, favoritism, sexism, racism, nepitism.... well reported to senior levels and ignored!" provided it IS all "on the record with my names and dates and witnesses."
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