NY Post: Former NBC Stars and Execs Furious Over NBC News Prez Saying They'd 'Gone to Sleep'

August 28th, 2014 2:49 PM

The New York Post, which broke the story of David Gregory’s decline and “psychological evaluation” and fall at NBC News, reports former anchorman Tom Brokaw and others were “apoplectic” when NBC News president Deborah Turness “dropped the tactless clanger” in a New York Times interview on Sunday that “NBC News hadn’t kept up with the times in all sorts of ways, for maybe 15 years...I think the organization had gone to sleep.”

The headline over TV writer Bill Carter's story was “NBC News President Rouses the Network,” which played on those comments.

One “network insider” fumed to the Page Six team “Turness is making enemies. Her ‘asleep’ comment is incredibly disrespectful to many of NBC’s top journalists, especially Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, and her predecessors Steve Capus, Andy Lack, Neal Shapiro and Jeff Zucker.”

Another NBC source added, “The comment caused uproar inside NBC. Several people inside NBC News, including execs who report to Turness, complained....This notion she is swooping in from England to save a snoozing news organization is simply wrong.”

Right before the Rip Van Winkle comments in the Times story, Turness boasted:

“It has been an incredibly productive year,” she said over an Earl Grey tea in the Rock Center Café. “I have achieved more in the first year than I ever thought I could.”

One former colleague, who “asked not to be identified because of possible future business with NBC,” told the Times that Turness brought “a bit of rock-chick swagger to a newsroom full of middle-aged men.”

 

Isn't "chick" supposed to be demeaning and sexist?