Today co-anchor Ann Curry delivered an emotional, relatively brief adieu on the show this morning after being unceremoniously pushed out of her dream job. “This is not as I expected to ever leave this couch after fifteen years,” she told viewers. “You are why I have ventured into dangerous places and interviewed dictators and jumped off of planes and off of bridges and climbed mountains and landed in the South Pole and convinced the Dalai Lama to come live in our studio. You know, I have loved you and I have wanted to give you the world, and I still do.”
But while fighting back tears through some effusive words, Curry also managed to throw a few subtle barbs in the general direction of the detractors who have blamed the show’s rating declines on her lack of Katie Couric–style charisma. Curry is, after all, a serious reporter and skilled interviewer, one that some believed was above Today’s fluff. “They’re giving me some fancy new titles,” she said of the network that reneged on her promotion after just a year.
“We’re being given the chance to do the work that most of us got into journalism to do,” Curry noted at one point with a hint of derision in her voice. Later, as her co-workers quite stiffly cited her serious work, she added, “I’m proud of this show for putting that kind of material on TV.”
It was hard not to hear a dash of bitterness. Her hurt, though, was also real: “For all of you who saw me as a ground-breaker, I’m sorry I couldn’t carry the ball over the finish line,” Curry said. “But man, I did try.”
