I am going on record and officially nominating Matt Lauer for one of the most annoying people of 2009.
In life, there is one and only one thing that I agree with Tom Cruise about and that is that Matt Lauer is a “glib putz”. In general, I am a Good Morning America fan but sometimes I’m really lazy in the morning all day and the effort it would take to find the remote and change the channel from NBC to ABC before the Today show starts is just more than I can handle. On those days, I find myself nauseated by the uber annoying Matt Lauer.
He’s so ridiculous. The most annoying thing about Matt Lauer is how he can barely tolerate his own annoyance with his co-hosts. He is also seriously incapable of keeping his opinions to himself. And, I swear his journalism skills are on par with a two year old. My niece is three and she is better at asking questions than Matt. When she asks questions they are of two varieties. It’s either the classic, “Why?” or the more theological questions of, “What are you talking about?” I think I’d like Matt a whole lot more if he’d stick to her script instead of insisting on being the world’s most emotional interviewer in the history of interviewers. In my personal opinion, the epitome of his career would be his ground breaking interview with Britney Spears where he judged her parenting skills during a prime time special. Wow, Matt – thanks for breaking that story.
So just when I thought Matt Lauer could not annoy me anymore than he already does, the Today show announces they are canceling “Where in the World is Matt Lauer?” and replacing it with Matt Lauer’s exploration of the US and affordable domestic vacation spots. Apparently, the network thinks that it will be in bad taste to explore the world given the current economic conditions and that by traveling locally, more people will be able to relate to Matt. While I appreciate the fact that this will mean that I do not have to watch any of the annoying promotional material NBC creates for the where in the world series for the next month, I’m fairly annoyed by this stunt. Why would anyone want to relate to Matt Lauer?
Clearly, I’ve thought about this a lot and I think Matt and Anderson Cooper suffer from the same problem, they left the life of real reporting in the field for a cushy job in the city and now spend their days reporting about sleep walking dogs and performing rhythmic dance. Believe me, I know there are times in your life where you are going to have to do ridiculous things for money. For instance, one time I had to attend a teletubby themed birthday party for a 40 year old client who was obsessed with the dolls and another time I had to drive my boss to her doctor after she came to the office claiming she had an out of body experience when she switched her DayQuil with her NyQuil. But those were isolated events. For Matt, every day of his career is a teletubby themed birthday party.