It’s adorable seeing The Today Show, that gormless bastion of softball morning filler, standing behind journalistic integrity (two words that in no way apply to the show) when one of their guests isn’t cool talking about a subject she shouldn’t have to talk about in the first place.
Following her performance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live over the weekend, Amy Adams turned up for The Today Show to promote her new film Big Eyes. Everyone knows the drill here: Celebrity A wants to promote Project B and Morning Show C is happy to toss PR-friendly questions that make everyone look good and everybody wins. But this time, Today wanted to drum up more sensationalism over the Sony hack – this month’s Ebola panic. Since Adams was remotely implicated in the affair as a named dropped in a corporate email about women getting paid less than men in Hollywood, Today wanted to drag her through the mud and she clearly didn’t want to play ball.
Realizing they had a guest who wasn’t interested in doing anything she hadn’t signed up for, Today cancelled the interview. Adams hasn’t commented, but the show released a snippy statement: “As a news program, the Today Show doesn’t allow guests to dictate restrictions on interviews. In this case, after hours of discussion we felt uncomfortable with the demands being made and we determined the best course of action for all parties involved was to cancel the interview.”
Different outlets spin the story depending on their own agendas: Deadline sided with Adams, asserting that Adams was willing to do the interview and going so far as to point out that Bradley Cooper who was implicated in the same email wasn’t asked during his American Sniper promotion, while the New York Daily News chose the juicier tack that Adams “freaked out.”
Methinks The Today Show doth protest too much.
Amy Adams is a class act always. Whatever went down here, it was The Today Show’s fault.
“Yes, Amy, would you please endanger your career and answer our questions about these things that are none of our business but between you and your agent and the producers of the pictures you make?”