More than a year after parting ways with NBC, former Meet the Press anchor David Gregory was back on TV news for the first time this morning, appearing on CBS This Morning.
“What’s this eye over my shoulder, where am I,” joked Gregory. He was booked to talk about his new book, “How’s Your Faith?” In the book, and on CTM, Gregory opened up about his dismissal from NBC News last summer.
Gregory says, after a drawn out process, he learned of his departure from a tweet as he was heading to New Hampshire to pick up his kids from camp. “[NBC] was concerned if they let me have a last show to thank the audience I would go after them. They called it the Ann Curry moment of the Today show and they wanted to avoid that. That was never going to happen. They leaked the fact that they had made a decision for me to go.”
It’s a tough business. The only thing I’d say is, it was handled in a way that was unnecessary. NBC made a business decision that you can agree with or disagree with, and it didn’t need to be handled in that way. The process was difficult. And rather than get into the nastiness of it, I just tried to internalize what I take away from it, what I could have done a little better in terms of how I treated people so that people might have been rooting for me a little more both within NBC and the wider community.
“I don’t miss NBC,” added Gregory. “I don’t miss being there. It was just the wrong atmosphere for me. I did miss Norah, though. She’s, frankly, a bigger diva than I was.”
Gregory and O’Donnell both worked in NBC’s DC bureau. Interestingly, filling in for Charlie Rose was John Dickerson who is now host of CBS’s Sunday morning public affairs show Face the Nation.
Gregory also talked with New York Magazine about the NBC departure. Asked specifically about his relationships–and conflicts–with current Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, NBC News president Deborah Turness, and others.