Top of the Morning by Brian Stelter

Author:Brian Stelter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

May the Best Booker Win

It was around midnight on a September night in 2011 when Charlie Rose sang Homer-like, through wine-darkened teeth, about vanquishing the Today show in the Nielsen ratings. He asked me, “Do you think I can beat Matt Lauer?” (I dodged the question by saying, “Well, you certainly have the hair for it.”) Rose was lounging, among a half dozen friends, in a cozy corner of Le Cirque, across a courtyard from the headquarters of his friend Michael Bloomberg’s media company on the East Side of Manhattan. Earlier that evening Bloomberg (the company) had thrown him a party to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Charlie Rose, his much-praised interview program on PBS and Bloomberg TV. His friends had turned out in force: Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, News Corporation’s chief Rupert Murdoch, The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper. Bloomberg (the man) had heaped praise on Rose’s extraordinary record of quality TV—“This program has been one of the few places where you can find smart, stimulating conversation,” he’d said, offering a toast. It had been a lovely event. But that night Rose, although pushing seventy and five years past open-heart surgery, was thinking more about his next challenge, weighing an offer for a project that demanded much and promised little. If he said yes, he, along with Gayle King, an editor at large at O, the Oprah Magazine and a longtime pal of Winfrey, would be leading CBS’s latest assault on GMA and Today.

CBS This Morning, as the network would name it, was envisioned as a brand-new kind of morning program, something unlike anything attempted on American television in the last twenty years. This show would have no pop-culture quizzes, cooking segments, outdoor concerts, or late-breaking news about reality show stars. It would have no street-level studio from which crazed tourists could be seen yearning for the sight of a cast member, proposing to each other, or waving homemade signs. No, the all-new program Rose was considering would be produced by Licht, the Morning Joe maker, and it would put a premium on political, public policy, and foreign news stories. It would be an interview show. It would buck tradition by being what journalism professors call “good.”

Licht started in early June and had until the end of the year to assemble a new cast (Fager and Rhodes were helping with that), hire new staffers, prepare a new studio, come up with a new name, record a new soundtrack, and do dozens of other things that there really wasn’t time for. The makeover was extensive because, as one survivor from the staff said, “there was a thirty-five-year culture of losing” at the network, and Fager and Rhodes wanted Licht to get rid of every last trace of it. Practically the first thing he did was fire Shalev’s bespoke couch. In its place he put out a glass-topped table with seats for five. “It should feel important, yet intimate,” he wrote in a memo for the set designers. “As if the viewer has a chair at the table.

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