Late on Sunday night, shortly before the second presidential debate, NBC made the decision to suspend Billy Bush from his position with the Today show. After the leaked video of Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women while Bush giggles in the background made headlines, the TV host issued the standard apology for a media personality caught saying or doing something really stupid. Compounding things is the fact this isn’t the first time this year Bush has brought a measure of disgrace to NBC News. It was in an interview with Bush that Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte first began pushing that entirely made-up story about being robbed at gunpoint in Rio De Janeiro.
The entire episode has raised a lot of questions and speculation as to what has been going on behind the scenes at NBC. That speculation includes suspicion that more examples of boorish behavior might exist on videotape somewhere, with attention directed at the raw footage archives for The Apprentice—especially with claims Trump was sexist and demeaning toward contestants. Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice and president of MGM Television and Digital Group, has claimed he doesn’t have the ability to release the footage, even though other reports have asserted Burnett has threatened employees with litigation if they should leak any material. That’s a claim which Burnett strongly denies.
But there’s a weird thing about the leak of the original Access Hollywood footage and audio. Access Hollywood is distributed by NBCUniversal Television and produced by KNBC. However, it was the Washington Post which broke the story. This is especially curious given there are now stories saying Billy Bush not only remembered how lewd his encounter with Donald Trump was—he even bragged about it to NBC staffers. And there are now reports it’s not a question of if Bush will be forced out at NBC, but when.
So why didn’t NBC News get the jump on this story?
From John Koblin and Michael M. Grinbaum at The New York Times:
The video was discovered last Monday by an “Access Hollywood” producer, and Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News, learned of the tape’s existence the next day, according to two people briefed on internal network discussions … The Post reporter who obtained the tape, David Fahrenthold, received a copy late Friday morning. When NBC’s news division learned that The Post was working on the story, it moved quickly: Within about 10 minutes of The Post’s publishing its version, the NBC News correspondent Katy Tur went on MSNBC with a story about the video, showing the footage.
Interviews show that NBC lawyers, erring on the side of caution, examined whether the network could be vulnerable to a lawsuit for airing the recording, and discussed whether it was ethical to use live-microphone audio from a private moment with Mr. Trump — who was inside a van, off-camera — that was not intended to be broadcast.
Executives at NBC’s news division, meanwhile, deferred to their corporate cousins at “Access Hollywood,” giving them first crack at airing the footage that was theirs — even as the entertainment show, unaccustomed to stories of such gravity, took its time. NBC officials, believing that the footage was closely guarded, did not think it was in danger of leaking.
Mr. Bush, who said he was “embarrassed and ashamed” by his behavior, is facing an online backlash. Early in the weekend, NBC had no plans to discipline him, but on Sunday evening the network said it was suspending him indefinitely. It was unclear how long he would be away from the show.
Of course, if one were suspicious, one might suspect the delay was not due diligence to matters of legal necessity, but maybe concerns about embarrassment to the network and their on-air personalities. Especially since NBC has had a complicated relationship with Donald Trump, where the network claimed to break business ties with the Republican nominee after some of his statements about immigration, but then had no problem with him being invited to host Saturday Night Live, which served to promote his candidacy. And there is the fact this video has existed in an archive for 11 years. Over the course of the primaries and the general election, through so many controversies and lies connected to Trump, no one at the network has looked through old tape, or talked to anyone involved with those productions for info?
Also, it’s a little suspicious the tape was leaked to the Washington Post if NBC News was planning to air the story. It would seem to indicate that at least some staffer over at NBC didn’t believe the tape was going to see the light of day, and maybe forced their hand.
From Jack Shafer at Politico:
NBC doesn’t look good here, and no amount of finessing will make it look any prettier. The NBC News tick-tocks published by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN portray the network as an overly cautious, lawyer-dominated entity, more interested in protecting its employee Bush—who has recently joined NBC’s Today show—than performing like a hard-charging news outlet. It was, after all and in retrospect, the biggest story of the general election. When a secular organization blames the Jewish holidays for its tardiness, as an unattributed NBC News source does in the Times story, somebody is blowing smoke. When the Washington Post, no libel and invasion-of-privacy mill, can turn around the same story in five hours indicates that NBC’s frets of legal problems were more imagined than real.
Billy Bush’s behavior, and hell even his position at NBC or any other network claiming to be a news organization, is symptomatic of a media that has continuously blurred the lines between entertainment and serious news. We’ve just endured an election season which has for the most part been predicated on Trump using cable news networks as a PR platform. The news networks have loved covering and catering to Trump because it’s like broadcasting a daily car wreck that works as spectacle. Except, in this case, it’s a spectacle that has stoked the worst aspects of our society, and lowered the bar of common decency within American politics to a new nadir.
There comes a point when objectivity is lost. When on-air talent have close relationships with Trump, and at times act as his apologists —I’m looking at you crew of Morning Joe— how can people not question the reliability of those “news” networks?