We all know them… colleagues or bosses who wield enormous power often based on the most ephemeral set of skills or talents. Many are sycophants, some are pathological, others are deceitful and conniving, but they invest considerable time embellishing their careers, often in spite of their limited talent and acumen, often if not always at the expense of others.
Network news, a business I happen to know well, is filled with such people. There are both men and women who have truly slept their way to power and prominence. There are those who have married their careers to anchors and executives only to be eviscerated themselves, as if by a scythe, when their powerful benefactor’s star has lost its luster.
Last week ABC News announced the departure of long time executive Mimi Gurbst. Many believe the 30-year veteran was edged out in a power shift that promoted those in Diane Sawyer’s coterie and cast aside those who were not among the favored few. Others believe this is a touch of long-delayed justice for an individual who had littered her career path with other’s reputations. What makes all this so interesting is the reaction to this story in The New York Observer “Top ABC News Producer Leaving Network To Become High School Guidance Counselor” by Frank Gillette. Mr. Gilette’s fawning lede and story, heaped with praise and adulation, triggered the most amazing series of comments – more than 100 of them, and none positive. Reading the posts one cannot help but conclude that engaging with Ms. Gurbst professionally was like touching the third rail.
Network news is an industry which often puts its best face on its own dirty laundry and unpleasantries. No where is this more visible than in tributes or saccharin eulogies offered about individuals who were not particularly well thought of even when they were alive. But I cannot recall a public recollection made by colleagues laced with such vitriol and venom. And that’s the lesson… if you live by the sword be prepared to be cut and slashed and wounded by those whose personal and professional reputations you traded as the currency of gossip, innuendo, and disrespect.
In disclosure I knew Mimi Gurbst at ABC years ago. I haven’t spoken with her in more than a decade.
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