b y Luke Mullins Dec 21, 2014

Last summer, Gregory was let go from his gig as host of "Meet the Press." Here's an inside look at his fall from the top—and what it says about the state of TV news.

David Gregory was driving through the mountains of New Hampshire when he got the call that no TV personality ever wants to answer. It was August 14, 2014, a Thursday. Gregory and his wife were on their way to pick up their kids from summer camp, according to friends. On the line was an executive in NBC’s New York headquarters, telling Gregory once and for all that his run as moderator of Meet the Press was over.

This wasn’t exactly news to the Sunday-morning host. Meet the Press’s ratings had been tanking for several years. And for the last week or so, Gregory and the network had been busy negotiating his exit package.

But the deal wasn’t finished, and Gregory had planned to be back in Washington to host the show that Sunday. So the call from New York took him by surprise.

The executive explained that NBC wouldn’t be able to keep his departure under wraps much longer. Rumors of Gregory’s demise had been swirling for several months. Navel-gazers in the Washington and New York press corps had been gleefully printing every last shred of gossip they could forage. Now reporters were circling once again, and it looked like the network was about to lose control of the story. The announcement would have to come today.

Gregory and his bosses wanted to break the news themselves, and they had to scramble to finalize the official line on his exit.

They were too late.

Before they could get their stories straight—and before they finally sewed up Gregory’s severance—CNN reported that he was out and that his chief rival, NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd, would take over as moderator.

After being scooped, Gregory was compelled to take to Twitter to put his own spin on the ouster. “I leave NBC as I came—humbled and grateful,” he tweeted. “I love journalism and serving as moderator of MTP was the highest honor there is.”

It was the final indignity in a chaotic and embarrassing fall from the top. For six years, David Gregory had owned the most coveted job in political journalism. Meet the Press first aired in 1947 and is now the longest-running show on network television. It started as a half-hour press conference and evolved into the place where Presidents came to make news—John F. Kennedy called it “the 51st state.”

But under Gregory, the most prestigious political franchise in Washington media had collapsed. Although he took over at a time when eyeballs were declining across the board because of 24-hour cable news networks and a constant stream of internet talking heads, no Sunday show plunged further than his. Between 2008, when Gregory took over, and last summer, just before he left, Meet the Press lost 43 percent of its viewers and dropped from first to third place in the ratings.

It would be easy to write off Gregory’s ouster as a garden-variety network-talent hit job. No one in TV can hide from the numbers, and Gregory’s record had made him a clear target for NBC executives. But there was more to his downfall than Nielsen data. Nasty internal sabotage, TV-size egos clawing for his job, and a new NBC News boss looking to blow up convention all contributed to Gregory’s demise.
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But Gregory pounced, and from the moment his promotion was announced, political elites eager to get exposure on the show treated him differently. “All of a sudden he was everybody’s best friend,” says a close friend. “I joked, ‘Wow, you’ve gotten so much more handsome.’ ”

The network, meanwhile, gave his old White House job to Chuck Todd.
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To rally political support for the merger, Comcast’s political-action committee handed out campaign cash, and Cohen worked to head off the concerns over diversity. Between 2008 and 2010, Comcast’s corporate foundation donated more than $3 million to 39 minority groups that wrote letters to federal regulators in support of the NBC deal. Comcast and NBC Universal also worked out an agreement with advocacy groups guaranteeing increased “minority participation in news and public affairs programming”—so long as the deal went through. And in 2009 and 2010, Comcast gave $155,000 to an organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who ended up endorsing the merger.

The campaign paid off. In January 2011, Washington approved the deal. One week later, NBC signed Cohen’s old boss, Ed Rendell, to an on-air contract. At MSNBC, which Comcast also owns, Sharpton landed a talk show.

Before Comcast came along in 2011, David Gregory thrived at Meet the Press. Top White House officials returned his phone calls and took the time to explain complicated policy matters, Gregory’s friends say. Leading figures in business and politics helped him craft questions. “He loved it,” says a close friend.

For three straight years, Gregory kept Meet the Press in the number-one slot. Every six months or so, GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, would call to say, “You’re doing a great job,” according to Gregory’s friends. But even while the show remained on top, viewers were leaving the network, and its lead over CBS and ABC gradually shrank. The slow bleed eventually became a crisis. By late 2012, Meet the Press had lost a quarter of its viewers and, after 16 years, surrendered its ratings crown to Face the Nation. Gregory took the blame.
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The network decided it needed to learn more about Gregory to help him establish a stronger connection with his audience. So it had the branding consultants interview his wife, friends, and colleagues, according to people familiar with the research. Producers later encouraged Gregory to mention his family and his Jewish faith on the air to help viewers get to know him better.

Nothing worked. In August 2013, Meet the Press’s ratings plummeted to 21-year lows.


for more:
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/pe...s-job/index.php