Matt Lauer asks General Motors' CEO if she can be a good mother too

The media playbook for managing a crisis the size of General Motors' neverending recall drama calls for running both offense and defense. That was surely the thinking of why General Motors Chief Executive Mary Barra sat down with the Today show and Matt Lauer for a live interview this morning (live being a format that draws viewers but also limits how much pressure a questioner can bring). Yet the news from the interview wasn't so much Barra's defense, but Lauer's question about being both a mother and a CEO — and the offense several viewers took.

Yes, Barra is the first woman CEO of a major automaker, an industry dominated by men. And Barra does often talk in interviews about her home life and her two children. But even though she's worked at GM her entire adult life in a variety of engineering and corporate jobs, her promotion still drew fire from critics who questioned whether she was qualified enough — and when the recall debacle broke, so did the conspiracy theories that Barra had been "set up" to fail.

The idea that a woman was somehow naive in accepting a promotion to CEO has its own deeply sexist roots, let alone that suspecting shadowy GM execs of masterminding a Machiavellian power play contradicts all we know about a company so bureaucratic it had its own body language for shirking responsibity. But Lauer would have been guilty of journalism malpractice if he hadn't asked about the controversy today.

It was the follow-up question where things went a little off: