Consequences of Leadership

Finally, one more thought. One of the great leaders of the 20th century, Winston Churchill, said that the price of greatness is responsibility. We’ve been watching as some people striving for greatness are being held responsible, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who found a way to get the Congress to keep the government funded, only to be confronted with one of his own Republican colleagues trying to kick him out of his job. We need a new speaker. This is not personal against Mike Johnson. He’s a very good man and I I have respect for him as a person, but he is not doing the job. We’re President Xi of China, who aspires to greatness by making sure he holds the reins of power in his economy but may end up bearing responsibility for it’s slowing growth. I think this is all about state control. You know, Xi Jinping is all about control. And right now, China’s all about Xi Jinping. This week we saw the price of greatness in the corporate world as Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced that he’d be stepping down after a series of problems with Boeing planes. Undermine confidence in his leadership, especially from his airline customers. Everybody’s worried about Boeing. We’ve got to get Boeing back to the point where it it produces an impeccable product and Nelson Peltz continues to do his dead level best to hold Bob Iger responsible after years of great performance as Disney CEO as his proxy battle comes to a climax at the annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday. This really is a story, not necessarily about Nelson Peltz, though Disney is actually sort of pushing that that line. But really it’s more about the governance, the company itself. But perhaps the strangest example of someone trying to hold a leader responsible comes from NBC, which last Friday announced it would be adding Ronna McDaniel as an on air contributor just two weeks after she stepped down as chair of the Republican National Committee. In a memo to staff this, NBC Senior vice President for politics said that quote, it couldn’t be a more important moment to have Miss McDaniel on the team. Well, other members of the NBC team begged to disagree. Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski all very publicly objected in some pretty strong terms to what their leadership had done. And so NBC promptly reversed course and decided that Miss McDaniel would not be joining its team after all. Look, let me deal with the elephant in the room. I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don’t know what to believe. Trust me, this isn’t the first time that those in The Newsroom have challenged decisions made by leadership. When I ran ABC News, there were any number of times that my colleagues took issue with things. I was doing everything from giving Leonardo DiCaprio a role on an Earth Day special to using digital technology to cut the size of some of our crews in the field. I even had some internal pushback when I brought George Stephanopoulos on, and it came from none other than Peter Jennings, the journalist journalist. Peter told me I was making a big mistake because George had not been trained in the craft, and even worse, he’d spent time in the Clinton White House several years before. Looking back on it now, the issue seems almost quaint given the first rate reporter, interviewer, and anchor George has become. And in fairness to Peter, after he’d worked with him for a few months, he came back to me to say he’d been wrong, that George had the instincts and the work ethic of the best journalists in our newsroom. But then again, I’m not aware that George Stephanopoulos ever challenged the legitimacy of an election that he’d lost. We should all be concerned about the care, custody, integrity of every ballot. But that’s all I’m saying. And you know what? This is a viewpoint of a lot of Republicans, and they think Joe Biden’s the president, but they also think there were problems. And both can be true.