14 DAY TRIAL // NBC and The Today Show are still to recover fully from the disaster that firing Ann Curry from the show turned out to be but, even so, the network has decided not to keep her on board for that much longer, it has emerged.
Inside sources tell Radar Online that, with Curry’s $12 million (€8.8 million) a year contract being up soon, NBC bosses have already decided not to have it renewed. So, when that happens – and it will happen “soon,” according to report – Curry will be out for good from NBC.
The same insiders say that she might be landing a job with ABC or even CNN or, at the very least, that she’s in talks to see if anything in this sense pans out. However, even if it does, she’ll be lucky if she gets a quarter of the salary NBC was paying her because, to put it mildly, times have changed.
As for NBC’s decision not to keep her as National and International Correspondent / Anchor for NBC News and the Anchor at Large for TODAY, that’s partly related to her departure from The Today.
“There was a time very soon after Ann was fired from TODAY that it was inconceivable the network would let her go. She had a lot of allies, but after New York Times reporter Brian Stelter wrote his book (Top Of The Morning: Inside The Cutthroat World Of Morning TV), those people never rallied to Ann’s defense,” says one spy.
In the book, Ann was portrayed as a victim who was always mocked by her male colleges and humiliated whenever they got the chance.
“There was a lot of information in the book about what went on when Ann was let go from TODAY that only a few people were privy to. Conclusions were made, rightly or wrongly, about who the anonymous sources that provided the information to Stelter were,” the insider explains.
And it wasn’t just what was written in the book that probably contributed to NBC bosses’ decision to let Ann go: in May last year, she filled in for Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News and ratings were so dismal that, when he went on medical leave in August, they didn’t even consider to ask her to stand in for him.
A rep for NBC has denied there’s any truth to the report above.