Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (20 page)

What was missing was Mika. The day before his tryout on May 9, while walking down the hallway at MSNBC’s old Secaucus, New Jersey, headquarters, Scarborough ran into Brzezinski, whom he’d seen on the air but never met. She’d made an impression on him by ending some news updates with the line “Now back to
SCARBOROUGH Country
,” exaggerating his name for comic effect. “Nice to meet you and by the way,” he said, “I want you to know, I know you’re making fun of my show.”

Brzezinski, without blinking, responded, “How can I make fun of a show that I’ve never even seen?”

Scarborough liked her sassy style. “I immediately thought I had found my cohost!” he said. He told Griffin he wanted to have her beside him when he auditioned the next morning. “This,” Griffin said later, “was the first time in history that a solo host of a program wanted a cohost.” He gave Scarborough credit for recognizing that Brzezinski made him better: “He said, ‘I need her.’ That shows a self-awareness on his part that a lot of people on television don’t have.”

By this time Griffin had already tried out a battery of other hosts. “Phil had always liked Joe,” Abrams said, but “didn’t think Joe was the right choice for the morning slot.” But no one else felt right, either. “He became, in effect, the only choice,” Abrams said. And an excellent one. When he finally got his turn, Scarborough exuded confidence. “Maybe it was arrogance,” Licht said, “but I don’t think Joe ever entertained the fact that he wouldn’t get the job.”

Jeff Zucker, the NBC CEO, was impressed by Scarborough early on. (“On their third day,” Griffin recalled, “I called Zucker, and he said it before I could: ‘Joe’s good.’”) But executives like to feel they’ve earned their suits, and some at MSNBC and its parent, NBC News, wanted another woman paired with Scarborough, although, in the tradition of TV bigwigs, they didn’t have specific suggestions of who that woman might be. “I was taken off a few times,” Brzezinski said. “They kept trying other female hosts and there just wasn’t chemistry,” Scarborough added.

While the NBC brass toyed with her, Brzezinski gave
Morning Joe
its first bit of buzz. Shortly after six on a Tuesday morning in late June, she was handed a script for the news segment of the show. The top story, as selected by the writer, was Paris Hilton’s release from jail—she’d been arrested for…wait, it doesn’t matter—a few hours earlier. “I was supposed to sell the Paris story as interesting,” Brzezinski wrote in her memoir
All Things at Once
. “To me, though, it was emblematic of everything that was wrong with television news.”

Sticking to her principles, Brzezinski refused to read the script, and said it right on the air. “I hate this story and I don’t think it should be our lead,” she said. Scarborough, Geist, and the producers took this spontaneous moment and ran with it, making it a leitmotif of the three-hour broadcast. An hour in, at seven a.m., she pretended to light the script on fire; at eight she fed it into a paper shredder on the set.

The protest, noticed by TVNewser and hyped by MSNBC’s Web site, garnered millions of views on the Web. “I am spinning…getting hundreds of emails,” Brzezinski wrote in an e-mail to me two days later. The incident put the show on the map. “We knew what our voice was, and now others did too,” Brzezinski said.

Morning Joe
borrowed from
Imus
a willingness to talk about serious topics like budget resolutions and the obesity crisis, sometimes for up to half an hour at a time. The show also came together with a clubby sensibility that made viewers think they were listening in on a meeting of media elites. But it was not entirely an old boys’ club as long as Brzezinski was around. The chemistry was so good that Licht even started showing up on screen, by virtue of a tiny camera installed in the control room. The move made sense because the three quickly became part of each other’s off-camera lives: Licht even provided wake-up calls for Scarborough, who because of his ability to tune out alarm clocks has nearly missed the show’s opening on several occasions, his closest call being a 5:56 a.m. arrival for a six a.m. live start. (Yes, it does sound impossible. But he swears he pulled it off somehow.)

In September 2007
Morning Joe
was made a permanent part of the MSNBC lineup. While Scarborough and Geist were given contracts that specified they’d be cohosts, Brzezinski wasn’t. She was given a generic MSNBC contract that put her several steps below the men. At the time, however, she didn’t speak up. At least she had dental, she thought.

With the 2008 presidential campaign just then gathering steam,
Morning Joe
seemed to have been born with a purpose. Brzezinski worked overtime to book guests, including leading Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Scarborough recalled, “She got everybody in the Democratic establishment, and a lot of people in the Republican establishment that would come on her show but not mine.” On days when Clinton was running the morning show gauntlet, she loved to make MSNBC her first stop. “Joe would get her laughing,” Brzezinski recalled. “By the time he was done, she was giddy and she was loose and she was ready to go.”

Politicians and pundits also warmed to the show because of the sheer amount of airtime they were given. Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, would finish up a three-minute hit on
Today
, then have nine or twelve minutes on
Morning Joe
. Through a monitor in the control room, Licht said he could see Russert visibly loosen up when it was time for
Joe
. “He loved doing the show because it was a conversation,” Licht said, a gab-fest with jokes, with tangents, digressions—and especially shout-outs for Russert’s beloved Buffalo Bills.

Scarborough lobbied Griffin for the money to take the show on the road to Iowa for the January caucuses, helping it to be identified early on as “event” television, something that people in political circles had to watch. And they did watch, as Scarborough knew from the angry e-mails he got from campaign aides who disagreed with something he’d said. Hard-core politicos don’t occur in nature in sufficient quantities to make a serious Nielsen dent, but the show was reaching what TV execs call the “right” people: campaign aides, business leaders, advertisers, heads of rival networks. In some ways Scarborough, Geist, and Brzezinski broke down the wall between media and subject. In 2010, when Licht suffered a near-fatal brain hemorrhage, his
Morning Joe
colleagues called Vice President Joe Biden, who’d had two aneurysms in 1988. Biden, in turn, sought out a world-renowned neurosurgeon and asked him to see Licht. Weeks later, Licht thanked Biden for saving his life.

But the
Morning Joe
buds were for a long time not equal in the eyes of MSNBC. For the first two years Brzezinski was being paid one-fourteenth as much as Scarborough, her cohost. We’re talking something under two hundred thousand dollars versus two million plus, here. The word that comes to mind is
preposterous
.

Scarborough, aware of the gross disparity, went to human resources and had a very large bonus check (she wouldn’t say exactly how large) placed in her account through a direct deposit. “I found out about it when I checked my bank balance and expected it to be negative, and instead there was more money in it than I’ve ever had in my life,” Brzezinski said. She was furious—but he fought back, telling her, “This is not about you, this is about business, and I’m making a business decision.” That, she said, is when she decided that she would leave MSNBC unless Griffin, the network president, gave her a new and substantially upgraded contract. Griffin did. (And she kept the bonus.)

In 2010, during the midterm election campaign,
Morning Joe
did something that
Imus in the Morning
had never come close to doing for MSNBC: it beat CNN in the ratings. The show ended the first quarter with, on average, one thousand more viewers than CNN’s shrinking
American Morning
. MSNBC bought a self-congratulatory ad in
The Times
, which annoyed the competition: when Licht bumped into a CNN vice president in Washington a few days later, the person told Licht, “Don’t get used to running those ads.” But MSNBC’s advantage over CNN only grew, and by the end of 2011
American Morning
had been canceled. The replacement show,
Starting Point
, which featured Soledad O’Brien and a roundtable of panelists, was roundly criticized for being a rip-off of
Morning Joe
, and CNN’s morning ratings continued to sink. (O’Brien privately and rightly blamed CNN for not marketing the show.)

The ripples sent out by Scarborough, Brzezinski, and Geist reached the wider world beyond cable: there were grumblings on the
Today
set that whatever viewers MSNBC was gaining in the morning were coming at the expense of the uber-network’s flagship show. Lauer was known to fume once in a while when people talked about a guest on
Morning Joe
as if that same person hadn’t also just been interviewed by him. ABC had its eye on the show, too: when it was casting Diane Sawyer’s replacement in 2009, some at Disney pushed for
GMA
to be “more like
Morning Joe
”—which is one of the reasons George Stephanopoulos was brought on.

*  *  *

No industry entity was more covetous of the cultlike MSNBC show than CBS—or as it should be more properly known in discussions of morning television, “poor CBS.” What used to be called the Tiffany network had been flailing and failing in the a.m. since it introduced
The Morning Show
in 1954. Walter Cronkite was the original host, followed by Jack Paar and Dick Van Dyke, among others.
Good Morning!
with Will Rogers Jr. was the 1957 replacement, followed fourteen months later by a different
Morning Show
at seven a.m. with Jimmy Dean. By then
Captain Kangaroo
had settled into the eight a.m. hour. The public sausage-making was not pretty. In his book
Who Killed CBS?
Peter Boyer recounted how the network’s longtime chairman William S. Paley would watch the morning broadcast while his valet served him breakfast in bed—then call the president of CBS News, Dick Salant, with specific complaints and changes.

The changes just kept coming: a very long series of noble experiments, halfhearted attempts, and outright embarrassments lasting fifty-odd years and starring (to name a few) Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Sally Quinn and Hughes Rudd (“the beauty and the grouch”), Bob Schieffer, Diane Sawyer, Bill Kurtis, Meredith Vieira, Phyllis George, Maria Shriver, Forrest Sawyer, Bryant Gumbel, Julie Chen, Harry Smith, Paula Zahn, Hannah Storm, and Maggie Rodriguez. Rumor had it that every day at nine a.m. Paley’s valet went into his crypt and rolled him over. The pioneer broadcaster, who died in 1990, certainly would not have liked what America was seeing. Consistency, generally agreed to be the single most important ingredient in morning TV, was present only in the form of its opposite. “We’ve been changing people like shirts!” said Phil Jones, head of the advisory board of CBS affiliates, in 1986. It was just as true in 1966, when the show was called
The CBS Morning News
, and in 2006, when it was called
The Early Show
.

“Morning needs patience,” said Zev Shalev, who came in as the executive producer of
The Early Show
in 2008. “You’re building an intimate relationship with the audience, asking them to tune in and give you two hours of their life each morning. They are looking for a long-term relationship.”

There was a lot Shalev couldn’t do—like ensure that his bosses would give him enough time to nurture a new cast. But he could replace the couch, which, come to think of it, is a pretty important part of the morning show formula, its presence implying that the cast is sitting in the same living room as the viewer. It wasn’t easy, Shalev said, to find the right couch, in terms of softness and sight lines—“it’s like Goldilocks, it has to be just right”—and he ultimately had to have one custom-built. And a nice couch it was. It was still there when he left eighteen months later.

*  *  *

Another
Early Show
producer came and went. And in 2011 it was time to try yet again. In February the CBS CEO Leslie Moonves put two new executives in charge of his news division: Jeff Fager, the producer of
60 Minutes
, as chairman, and David Rhodes, a former VP at Bloomberg and Fox News, as president. Fager wanted to remake the whole news division in the image of
60 Minutes
, a concept that had the full support of Moonves. Of course, much of what passes for news on morning television—fashion tips, trivia contests, literal bake-offs—is the antithesis of the one-hour-a-week newsmagazine. So
The Early Show
came under scrutiny right away. “I can tell you one thing, we were surprised as hell when they were doing karaoke in the middle of the eight thirty hour,” Fager said, still able to picture the day a year later.

Fager and Rhodes decided that the problem had not been their personnel per se, or their furniture, but the fact that CBS had been so darned locked in to imitating the great
Today
.

“NBC’s done a successful morning program for a very long time that has a particular format, and the audience has a particular expectation of what they’re going to get,” Rhodes said. “What we’d done for a very long time is put on different iterations of that—of the program they’ve put on. So they had a boy and a girl, we had a boy and a girl. They had a funny weatherperson, we had a funny weatherperson who wasn’t quite as funny and wasn’t quite as recognizable. They had a person at the news desk who read the headlines so we had a person who sat at a news desk and read the headlines. Everything was a pale imitation of what they have done very successfully for a long time.

“There’s a morning orthodoxy,” he continued, “that says, ‘It’s 8:19. We’re sautéing onions.’ We asked, ‘Why are we sautéing onions?’ They said, ‘Because it’s 8:19. That’s what you do.’”