But Gartner insisted in a memo to NBC staffers that the controversy, which has brought howls of complaint and embarrassment from his own department, merely hastened his previous plans to resign between August and October. The former Pulitzer Prize board chairman said he had planned to return to his family and the several newspapers he co-owns in his native Iowa.
"But given the publicity of late," Gartner wrote to staffers, "I think it best to announce it (the resignation) now in hopes that this will take the spotlight off of all of us and enable us to concentrate fully on our business."
Although both Gartner and his boss, NBC president Robert Wright, sought to portray the departure as a resignation, several NBC staff members called it an outright firing.
They said Gartner, a lawyer who is viewed by many of his troops as an aloof, arrogant outsider to the TV news business, had hoped to weather the Dateline storm. "He kept saying, 'I can survive this,' and every day it would get worse and worse," one NBC executive said.
After the Dateline debacle, another misstep tarnished NBC's record. Last Wednesday, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw read an apology acknowledging that his program had used misleading footage in a story on fish endangered by timber-cutting in Idaho. The footage purported to show dead fish, but it turned out they had been stunned.
In his letter of resignation, Gartner said that he would stay on until Aug. 1 and that NBC News executive vice president Don Browne would immediately start running the news division on a day-to-day basis. Some NBC staffers disputed that Gartner would stay on.
"He said he would stay on until Aug. 1 to provide some transition, but he's not going to be in this building (NBC headquarters in New York's Rockefeller Center) at all," said one NBC executive, who asked not to be named.
Gartner's tenure at NBC has been marked by highs and lows since the day he walked in the door, Aug. 1, 1988.
