Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (37 page)

GMA
returned to first place in the demo the week after Thanksgiving and stayed there for the rest of 2012. This was in spite of ABC’s prime-time schedule, not because of it: the network’s audience at night was minuscule, while NBC was enjoying a resurgence, yet people were still switching the channel to
GMA
in the morning. America had chosen.

Nash officially took over on Monday, December 3. But Bell came back that day for a televised toast. The cast, equipped with champagne glasses, congregated in the control room at eight thirty a.m., where Bell was sitting at his old desk in the middle of the room. Nash was still standing in his former spot in the front row, running the minute-by-minute production of the show. The body language was telling. Bell didn’t bother to stand up while Lauer congratulated him for “seven fantastic years” and Guthrie told him to “enjoy sleeping in.” Like a lot of
Today
segments from the last few years, it seemed like something you’d seen already. But Bell clinked his glass with all the cast members and said thanks. Then Lauer, as he had done with Curry, asked Bell to assure him that they would surely work together again, at the next Olympics.

“We’ll see you in Sochi, right?” Lauer said.

“Russia and Rio,” Bell affirmed.

After the toast, Roker invited viewers to see what was happening in their neck of the woods and Lauer hurried upstairs for an interview in the studio. The other hosts told Bell again how much they appreciated his management over the years. Morales, who speaks Spanish and Portuguese, said, “If you ever need a translator, you know who to call.” Roker shook Bell’s hand and said, “I’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth, baby.” All the while viewers were still seeing a local weather report—at least that’s what the
Today
hosts thought. Lauer wasn’t in place for the interview yet so Guthrie, acknowledging the awkwardness of Bell’s goodbye, deadpanned, “Jim would love to be interviewed a little further.” Bell laughed and said, “Yes!”

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.