President Donald Trump, a longtime fan of the New York Post‘s Page Six, must have been reading when the gossip page reported Monday that NBC News chairman Andy Lack is “facing the boot.”
Ever the media gossip, Trump amplified the report Thursday morning by tweeting that “Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse.”
But one of Lack’s employees, Mika Brzezinski, shot down the story on her show Thursday. “Not only is he attacking NBC’s chairman Andy Lack, our boss, with stupid rumors, but also he’s going after the truth,” she said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
The president has been melting down on Twitter about CNN over the last two days, suggesting multiple times that the network is in shambles because it was revealed that Michael Cohen attorney Lanny Davis served as an anonymous source for a story he no longer stands by.
Fox News host Howard Kurtz, a former CNN employee, criticized Trump’s attacks on Lack and CNN president Jeff Zucker. “A president of the United States should not be calling for the firing of two heads of private companies simply because he disagrees and doesn’t like their media coverage of him,” he said. “That is a step too far.”
Lack rejoined the company as chairman of NBC News and MSNBC in the spring of 2015. His tenure has been marked by strong ratings for the cable network but also the perception of missteps in the company’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations lobbed against Matt Lauer and Tom Brokaw.
Rumors of Lack’s coming departure have proliferated for months, but there’s no evidence the veteran executive is on his way out.
In November 2017, in a tweet about Lauer’s termination, Trump wrote, “When will the top executives at NBC & Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s past!”
Lack has also been a frequent target of Sean Hannity, the Fox News host who speaks regularly to the president.
