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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 21, 2010
The tale of Mimi Gurbst was all the rage last week in network television news circles. If you happen to be one of the few not to have savored the extraordinary spectacle that unfolded in the Comments section of Felix Gillette's article in the Media Mob section of The New York Observer then you should certainly check it out for yourself. Its obvious pleasures derive from the fascination of seeing office politics played out in lurid, raw, brutal, frank detail. Yet beneath those superficial delights, it teaches a telling lesson about ABC News as an institution and the state of the news business in general.
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TRUTH & RECONCILIATION (AND FEAR & LOATHING) AT ABC NEWS The tale of Mimi Gurbst was all the rage last week in network television news circles. If you happen to be one of the few not to have savored the extraordinary spectacle that unfolded in the Comments section of Felix Gillette's article in the Media Mob section of The New York Observer then you should certainly check it out for yourself. Its obvious pleasures derive from the fascination of seeing office politics played out in lurid, raw, brutal, frank detail. Yet beneath those superficial delights, it teaches a telling lesson about ABC News as an institution and the state of the news business in general.
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.
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.
