David Gregory has broken his silence for the first time since his public departure from NBC News in August last year.
The former “Meet the Press” moderator, who spent 20 years at NBC, described his expulsion as “publicly humiliating” and said that the network handled the situation poorly, according to CBS News.
"I don't miss NBC. I don't miss being there. It was just the wrong atmosphere for me," he said on Wednesday during an interview on "CBS This Morning," where he was promoting his new book “How's Your Faith? An Unlikely Spiritual Journey,”
“It was handled in a way that was unnecessary. NBC made a business decision which you can agree with or disagree with. It just didn’t need to be handled that way, and the process of it was difficult. I tried to, rather than get into the nastiness of it, I tried to internalize what I take away from it, what I could’ve done a little better in terms of how I could’ve treated people so people would’ve been rooting for me in terms of within NBC and in the broader community,” Gregory said, according to Politico.
Gregory said that he decided to leave on his own after he felt as though he was going to be given the pink slip by the network.
“The truth is I was not going to be fired then but I felt I was going to be…I had said to NBC look if you don’t shore me up, this was Washington, there was blood in the water, if you don’t shore me up because leaks that are coming from within NBC are very hurtful to me, it’s getting in the way of what we’re trying to do for the show. So if you’re not prepared to do that and they were not prepared to shore me up over the long term, it was time for me to go."
Ahead of his departure, there were leaks and rumors doing the rounds in Washington about how NBC was trying to fix their “David Gregory problem,” which included low ratings and a personality that rubbed his coworkers the wrong way.
Gregory’s book follows the former White House correspondent’s spiritual journey over the past few years and also addresses his departure from NBC, The Wrap reported.
"I was so consumed and self absorbed that I didn’t think enough about communicating enough to people if I’m doing well, you’re doing well we’re doing this together, so some people were not unhappy to get some comeuppance so i think i had to learn something from that,” he said.
