Feuding and Fighting

Call me crazy, but I love keeping up with the news, and so while I cook and eat my eggs and grits in the yawning, I watch The Today Show, CBS Mornings, and Good Morning America, with a dash of Morning In America on News Nation, dipping my spoon into each one just enough to check the temper of the nation as a new day dawns all over the place.

I might be giving up on Morning in America, which used to have Adrienne Bankert as the lone anchor. I think she is great and have followed her since her days on ABC. But now they have sent out to Central Casting and brought in a male anchor named Patrick Patrick or something else so perfectly newsy. He takes away from the show, but no one asked me. I will tell the producers of the show that he is perfectly filling the job of an anchor, because he is dragging the show to a stop.

The anchor teams on CBS (Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil, and Nate Burleson), ABC (Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, and Michael Strahan) and NBC (Savanna Guthrie and Hoda Kotb) are all fine mixes of every good ingredient in the anchor stew recipe. All these teams are augmented by backbench players, strong experienced hard news reporters, lighthearted feature reporters who can find you a story to break your heart and melt it all at once, wacky meteorologists in funny eyeglasses, the whole magilla. If you look across the spectrum of all these folks, you will find someone from just about every social group and background.

So why do we look behind the anchor desk to see if there are any scraps or half-finished grudges?

This was online the other day: "TODAY show fans have noticed some awkward tension during Tuesday's live broadcast.  It comes as claims are being made about hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie feuding behind the scenes."

Now. First off the bat, whoever wrote this is leaning hard on the old trope (false) about women not being able to work together without it turning into a brouhaha. I mean, really. How sexist, how stereotyped.

Second, and also third, I don't care if those two women, or any other twosome on any news broadcast lace on the boxing gloves after the show and go ten rounds in the ring. I worked with enough people (948) in my day to know that not everyone in a workplace likes each other or gets along. In fact, every time I see two coworkers going on about how they are like brothers from different mamas, I want to say whoa! In fact, I have seen two people squabble over who filled out the morning crossword in ink one minute, and then work together in spectacular fashion the next to get a mission accomplished. The fight didn't matter when there was work to be done.

C, why would anyone give a millisecond of thought to this? It might be made up in someone's mind. It might be true. I don't want to know if Hoda and Savannah get along, I will never know if they do, and it does not matter to me. I must say, if they are at odds, they are doing a mighty good job of hiding it, because some people would be tempted to chortle or guffaw at a coworker if they made a mistake or something, and then come back at them with a major eyeroll and say, "What are you, drunk or something?" 

But you don't see that on the news shows.

If you did, the ratings would go sky-high, though. People would stay home from work to see Tony Dokoupil and Nate Burleson arm wrestle at 8:30 AM.

"Hello, CBS? Got an idea..."