Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV
Page 28
From his seat in the control room, Bell stared ahead at the same wall of monitors that he had faced most mornings for seven years. From this vantage point he could see everything a Today show executive producer needed to see: Lauer getting mic’ed up in Studio 1A upstairs, fans waving signs on the plaza outside, correspondents standing by for live shots in other time zones. He could see GMA and CBS This Morning and Morning Joe and Fox & Friends and Squawk Box.
At this particular moment, though, he could also see something horrifying: he was on live TV! NBC’s stations had rejoined the Today show, but it seemed that no one in the control room had cued the cast. Actually, Nash had pointed and told them to “fill” the time, but for some reason no one had taken the new boss’s words as a signal to start. Bell saw that a close-up of the left side of his face was being beamed across the country. He swiveled to the left, looked into the camera, and froze.
“Are we on?” Roker asked. “All right, we’re on!”
“Just more time to talk with Jim,” Guthrie said, breezily applying a dab of professional polish to the gaffe. She asked what it was that Bell had liked best about working on the show, and as America watched he thawed instantly, and said nice things about the cast and crew, just as Curry had on her way out of morning television.
Afterword
In 1980, the same year that Good Morning America beat the Today show for the first time, stoking the biggest rivalry in television, Woody Allen released a movie called Stardust Memories. The movie opens with a black-and-white shot of two trains on parallel tracks. Allen is shown surrounded by miserable passengers on his train. Then he’s shown looking out the window, where he can see the glamorous passengers on the other train, full of life, full of joy. That train over there? It’s having a party. It pulls away right as a gorgeous passenger blows Allen a kiss.
In 2012, you might say Allen’s train was the Today show, and the party train was GMA. Millions of people were still Today people—they enjoyed waking up with Lauer and company every morning. But Today gave up nearly a quarter of its audience ages twenty-five to fifty-four, a terrible loss for any television show, and especially for one that had been firmly on top for sixteen consecutive years. Network sources spoke of a devastating fifty- to seventy-million-dollar dip in advertising revenue—the cost, perhaps, of falling from first to second place.
GMA, meanwhile, won new converts. The show began 2013 about half a million total viewers ahead of Today, its best performance in at least two decades. In February, when the show celebrated six straight months of weekly wins, ABC began to call it a “streak.” But in the twenty-five to fifty-four demographic, it was basically tied with Today. GMA was still technically in the lead, but the demo ratings gave Today reason to have hope.
Ben Sherwood continued to tell his hosts and producers to “play each day as if we’re half a million behind.” Reflecting on GMA’s accomplishments, Sherwood made it all sound deceptively simple: “We worked hard, had a clear strategy, and got lucky. We put together a winning combination, on air and behind the scenes. We played every day as underdogs and took nothing for granted. We seized the opportunity when they gave us an opening.
“And we know one thing for sure,” he added. “The fight goes on, the battle never ends.”
But the players change. On February 1, 2013, Steve Capus said that he was stepping down after seven years as the president of NBC News. The announcement had an air of inevitability, given the fact that Fili was keeping an increasingly close watch over the troubled news division. Fili moved downstairs from the fifty-first floor—where she had an office near Burke—to the third floor, right beside Capus’s office, the same week he decided to pack it up.
Some people surmised that Capus was the final victim of Operation Bambi. He didn’t see it that way, though. The day after he made the announcement, he went with his son to a music lesson. He played the bass, his son played the keyboard. And he felt tremendous relief.
At home in Connecticut, Jim Bell started waking up at a decent hour again. He made pancakes for his kids and prepared for 2014’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
The executives who remained at NBC, from Steve Burke on down, were united in the view that they had done the right thing by replacing Ann Curry with Savannah Guthrie. They admitted, however, that they might have gone about it wrong. They feared Matt Lauer’s reputation would never recover.
Curry continued to view the whole thing as a profound betrayal by Bell and Lauer. Though bestowed with the title of NBC News national and international correspondent, she rarely appeared on the network. She did, however, have a story on Today on Don Nash’s first week as the new executive producer—from New Zealand, where she’d interviewed the stars of The Hobbit. The fact that she was literally halfway around the world from Studio 1A was not lost on anyone.
Nor was the fact that Lauer was a fallen star. He had managed to renew his contract on the very last week of the Today show’s sixteen-year streak back in April. Now his colleagues complained that the money had been misspent. They wondered, wouldn’t Willie Geist or another cohost attract the same number of viewers for a fraction of the price? If Lauer had any regrets, he kept them to himself. But he did give in to Twitter’s charms and start tweeting more often—thereby reaching the growing number of people who woke up with their phones, not their televisions.
Guthrie and the rest of the cast defended Lauer, whose Q Score had fallen even further than Today’s ratings on a percentage basis. By January 2013, his score was a nine, down from nineteen in 2011. Previously, Lauer had been the most-liked man on morning TV, according to the data; now that title belonged to George Stephanopoulos. Al Roker, in a CNN interview in January, said Lauer had “had nothing to do with anything that happened on our show,” meaning Curry’s ouster. Roker diagnosed the media with a sick case of schadenfreude: for the better part of two decades, he said, “They had to write we were number one. And now we’re not, OK. Good on GMA. Good for them.”
* * *
CBS This Morning remained stuck in third place in 2012, right where CBS had stayed for decades. But the news division bosses were proud of the program and they stood by it, believing that it was an appealing alternative for viewers who would surely someday tire of Today and GMA. Around the time of the show’s one-year anniversary in early 2013, the ratings began to look up.
“When we came in, we were challenged to grow these broadcasts. And look what’s happening: steady, solid growth. Especially this year on CBS This Morning,” the news division president David Rhodes said in February. “But what’s even more encouraging is we’re getting that growth on quality. People know what we stand for. We’re more likely to reveal a crisis in Syria than a crisis in a spray-tan booth.”
* * *
Jeff Zucker took over CNN Worldwide in January 2013 and was charged with reviving the company’s flailing cable news channel. One of his first priorities, he said, was fixing the low-rated morning show called Starting Point. A week later he poached ABC’s Chris Cuomo, who been the news anchor on GMA years earlier. Then he started casting a female cohost, determined, as he was, to hit the morning show jackpot again.
* * *
Robin Roberts’s bone marrow transplant transformed her from a GMA host into a GMA viewer, just one of the millions who tune in every morning. “Now I get it,” she remarked on one of Josh Elliott and Sam Champion’s visits. It was the profound intimacy that viewers feel they have with television hosts they’ve never actually met. “I feel like I’ve been there with you guys every day!”
In December, after three months in isolation, Roberts began to venture out of her home. She donned a red dress for Champion’s wedding on the twenty-first. All the other GMA cohosts were there, too, save for George Stephanopoulos, who was on an out-of-town trip. Later that same day Roberts came to the GMA holiday party, marking the first time that most of the staff had seen her since the transplant. The music stopped, and Roberts was handed a microphone. “I will be back,” she vowed. And
sure enough, on January 9, 2013, Roberts received a tentative thumbs-up from her doctors to start the transformation back into a GMA cohost. Months would have to pass before she could just show up for work like anyone else. But the fact that she could show up at all was something of a miracle.
ABC arranged for Roberts to announce the good news on January 14, four months and sixteen days after she had signed off. A camera crew arrived at her apartment before dawn to set up a live shot in her living room at home. Roberts would say that her most recent bone marrow test showed no abnormalities—none. She hoped to be back behind the anchor desk sometime in February, assuming that the “reentry process,” as she called it, went smoothly.
“Ready?” Tom Cibrowski, in the control room, asked Roberts through her earpiece a few minutes before seven a.m. Her face was projected onto a big screen in the show’s Times Square studio—the next best thing to being there.
Cibrowski stood up as the song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” started playing at 7:01. “Hello, Robin,” Stephanopoulos said on the broadcast. “So nice to really see you.” The cohosts—and a few people in the control room—burst into applause.
What happened next was Roberts’s idea. Before the show she’d told Cibrowski that she wanted to greet viewers right at the top of the show, even though he was saving her formal announcement for the seven thirty half hour. Cibrowski then told Stephanopoulos, who knew exactly what she wanted to say. Stephanopoulos looked across the studio to the big screen and said, “I know you’ve been waiting 138 days to say this, so go for it.”
Grinning from ear to ear, Roberts looked downright effervescent. She threw her arms in the air, held her head skyward, closed her eyes, and proclaimed, with more energy than ever before, “GOOD. MORNING. AMERICA!”
A Note About Sourcing
Top of the Morning is the product of eighteen months of researching, reporting, and television-watching. I interviewed about 350 people, some of them multiple times. Many of the interviews were conducted on condition of anonymity because the sources—even the ones near the tops of their companies’ organizational charts—feared reprisals from their employers for speaking openly.
I interviewed each of the cohosts of Today and GMA, with two partial exceptions: Matt Lauer and Ann Curry declined to be interviewed for the book in the wake of Curry’s ouster.
Some quotes attributed to Today and GMA hosts and their bosses were recounted later by their colleagues. I tried, whenever possible, to interview sources within minutes or hours of climactic moments like Robin Roberts’s MDS announcement and Savannah Guthrie’s promotion, in the hope that I’d get closer to the truth that way.
My visits to the control rooms and studios of the morning shows shaped the book in big and small ways. NBC, ABC, and CBS insisted that most of these visits be off the record, with the understanding that they’d decide which quotes could be placed on the record later. They have operated this way for many years. I agreed to the restriction, knowing it was the only way I’d receive any access to the otherwise sealed-off studios, control rooms, and production offices of the shows. I also believed it would benefit my reporting, and in retrospect I know it did. For one thing, labeling the visits “off the record” assuaged the fear of some staff members that I would share information about bookings with their archrivals, and helped me to gain their trust.
These agreements were reached before my other employer, The New York Times, forbade the practice of “quote approval.” ABC scrubbed a few curse words from producers’ mouths but allowed virtually every other quote. NBC was more heavy-handed: every one of Jim Bell’s quotes from my control room visits were kept “off the record.” So were descriptions of Bell’s body language and his demeanor, descriptions of other staffers reacting to Bell, and some quotes from Ann Curry. NBC approved most of the rest of the control room material.
Once in a while, on particularly sensitive days when the PR apparatuses of NBC and ABC denied access to their studios, I simply peered into their street-level windows like a tourist.
Links to the works cited in the book and recommendations for further reading can be found at http://brianstelter.com/morning/.
Acknowledgments
In June 2011 I walked into Ben Greenberg’s office at Grand Central Publishing with a bad idea for a book about television news. I walked out with Top of the Morning.
During the meeting—arranged by my agent Kate Lee, who believed in my ability to write a book a full four years before I believed in it myself—Ben, Kate, and I brainstormed better ideas. Ben asked, “What about the mornings?” The mornings! Ann Curry had just taken over Today, and Josh Elliott and Lara Spencer had just joined GMA. Surely, I said, something interesting would happen in the next eighteen months. “The mornings—why didn’t I think of that?” I wondered as I walked out of the meeting. But that’s what editors are for.
Among the other things I didn’t think: that GMA would seize first place, that Curry would be demoted, or that Lauer would be blamed. So thanks are in order to ABC and NBC, for giving me a story worth telling!
Thanks also to Kate, for guiding me through the foreign terrain of book publishing. Thanks, Ben, for seeing a book where I just saw a time slot, for giving me the time and space to tell the story, and for tolerating my inevitable and surely irritating deadline-bending. Every author should hope to be as fortunate as I’ve been.
When Kate departed ICM agency in 2012, Kristine Dahl adopted the book as her own and matched me with Charles Leerhsen, who worked tirelessly with me to transform my lumpy chapters into a real live book. Not only did Charles know what I was trying to say better than I did, he knew what I didn’t need to say. (Readers, you were spared sixty thousand words of tangents.) Together, we conceived the zippy three-act structure that opened and closed with Today, with GMA in between. Charles, thank you.
My greatest thanks of all go to Jamie Shupak, whom I’m lucky to call my girlfriend (and roommate and pen pal, among many other titles). Jamie cured my spasms of self-doubt, red-lined my rough drafts, and asked the questions she knew readers were going to ask, making the book better in a hundred different ways. Jamie, I simply could not have written this without you by my side. Thank you.
Thanks as well to Bruce Headlam, Craig Hunter, and Bill Brink, my editors at The New York Times, who never wavered in their support of this second job. They made a hard thing much easier. So did The Times’ media columnist David Carr, who had my back the whole time, especially when the going got tough. I’m honored to call him a friend. Bill Carter, Jodi Kantor, and Andrew Ross Sorkin helped me figure out how to structure the book and convince skeptical sources to cooperate. Alex Weprin and Scott Kidder kept me sane.
Carolyn Wilder provided invaluable research help. The media monitoring service TVEyes, a virtual DVR for television, was indispensable.
Corporate communications professionals at the networks were enormously helpful when they could be, and apologetic when they couldn’t. At NBC they included Adam Miller, Kathy Kelly-Brown, Lauren Kapp, Amy Lynn, Monica Lee, Marie Wicht, and most of all Megan Kopf. At ABC, Zenia Mucha, Kevin Brockman, Jeffrey Schneider, Julie Townsend, Alison Bridgman, Alyssa Apple, and Heather Riley. At CBS, Sonya McNair and Kelli Halyard. At MSNBC, Jeremy Gaines and Lauren Skowronski. At CNN, Christa Robinson and Barbara Levin. Thank you.
Hundreds of sources, many of whom can’t be named here, taught me more about morning television than I ever dreamed I’d know. You know who you are. Thank you all.
And finally: Mom, whatever writing talent I have, I have thanks to you. You nurtured my youthful curiosity about the Web at great cost (I still cringe thinking about those domain hosting and long-distance phone bills) and you encouraged me to write, write, write. After Dad died it was your refusal to give up, your determination to give me and Jason and Kevin a normal life—bluntly, your determination to keep living—that got me to this final paragraph. Thank you.
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Act 1: Operation Bambi
Chapter 1: Operation Bambi
Chapter 2: America’s First Family
Chapter 3: Hands Are Tied
Chapter 4: “Here Comes the Storm!”
Chapter 5: Denial
Act 2: Good Morning
Chapter 6: Try Harder
Chapter 7: A Hole Dug Deep
Chapter 8: Unfinished Business
Chapter 9: Hacky Sack
Chapter 10: Morning Joe
Chapter 11: May the Best Booker Win
Chapter 12: Invincible
Chapter 13: Inevitable
Chapter 14: The Call from the White House
Chapter 15: “I Am Going to Beat This”
Act 3: (Almost) Instant Karma
Chapter 16: The New Girl
Chapter 17: Total Victory
Chapter 18: The Empty Chair
Afterword
A Note About Sourcing