Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (21 page)

Here Rhodes paused for dramatic effect before adding, “But we’re not good at cooking!”

Other great minds at other networks have come around to this same conclusion, about the futility of trying to win by out-
Today
-ing
Today
, but in TV the feeling is you’re not alive if you’re not imitating someone, so the CBS folks went with aping the anti-apers. Moonves had a very specific vision of what he wanted to do instead of slavishly imitating the industry leader. He wanted to fill his troubled two-hour time slot with
Morning Joe
.

*  *  *

Months earlier, in late 2010, a mutual friend of Moonves and Scarborough had reached out to Scarborough and Brzezinski to feel them out about a possible leap to CBS. The pair, as it turned out, were willing to listen. They had felt disrespected by MSNBC since the days in 2008 when they’d had to scrounge up the funds for a live show from Iowa. They’d wanted more airtime on the mother network, NBC, but had been rebuffed by NBC News president Steve Capus, who resented Scarborough’s on-air and Twitter feuds with his fellow MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Scarborough bluntly told associates that Capus “hated” him. (Capus said he didn’t.)

Scarborough and Brzezinski had expressed their desire to leave MSNBC for bigger things as early as 2010. Jeff Zucker, still NBC’s CEO at the time, had been willing to let them go if they agreed to stay off the air for six months. (When Olbermann left MSNBC a short time later, he accepted the same six-month non-compete clause.) Nothing had come of their dissatisfaction then, but they’d begun thinking seriously about leaving again when Fager and Rhodes took over CBS News. Scarborough and Brzezinski were particularly intrigued by Fager’s talk about “moving
60 Minutes
to the morning.”

Scarborough and Brzezinski were under contract to NBC, but their producer Chris Licht had more leeway. His contract was coming due, and after nearly four years of
Morning Joe
he wanted a change. On February 16, a week before Rhodes’s promotion to president was announced, Licht came over to the
60 Minutes
office on West Fifty-Seventh Street, where Rhodes was borrowing the office of Anderson Cooper, a part-time correspondent for the newsmagazine. (Rhodes’s own office across the street hadn’t been renovated yet.) They talked about their shared belief in good reporting and stimulating on-air discussions of the sort that happened regularly on
Morning Joe
. Licht later characterized the meeting this way: “We’re starting a revolution here and we want you to be part of it.” He came away energized and thinking, for the first time, that he actually might want to work the morning shift at CBS. Licht went from CBS to a ballroom on the East Side, where Scarborough and Brzezinski were giving a speech at an AmeriCares fund-raiser. “I remember telling them that I was kind of blown away” by the discussion at CBS, Licht said, “and we all just sat there in silence.”

While Licht entered into negotiations with CBS, Scarborough and Brzezinski talked again to NBC about possibly getting out of their contracts, which ran through 2012. Griffin, the MSNBC president, didn’t think the pair would actually leave, but he was willing to let them look elsewhere. He told friends later that he had been bluffing, giving them the illusion of choice. Griffin’s boss, Capus, said in a series of sometimes tense phone calls and sit-down meetings with the
Morning Joe
hosts that he wouldn’t allow them to go to ABC (he saw that as an “affront” to the
Today
show) but that he would free them to negotiate with other networks, like CBS. One meeting between Capus and Brzezinski turned especially heated.

“Steve, listen,” Brzezinski said. “You don’t like us. You’re not going to use us on the network. So let us go.”

Capus—living up to his “Rage” nickname—screamed his response. “Why the fuck would I let two people go that don’t even respect me?” He pointed and asked, “Do you respect me?” A heavy silence hung over the room. He leaned in and asked again, “Do you respect me, goddammit?”

Brzezinski sat across the table silently, trying to figure out what to say. After about five seconds, she had an answer.

“I respect the fact that you’re in a very difficult position.”

Scarborough and Brzezinski were in London for the Royal Wedding in April 2011 when they heard that the paperwork had come through, giving them permission to talk with CBS. Some in the industry thought they would stay on MSNBC through the end of the summer and then move on to CBS early in 2012. It was so serious that Griffin asked several colleagues for advice about how to replace
Morning Joe
in case the pair called his bluff and actually left. The best contender in-house, he thought, was Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC’s ten p.m. host—O’Donnell had the authority, the sense of humor, the ability to shift from serious to silly and vice versa. No amount of flattery or money, though, would have convinced O’Donnell to work those hours.

Licht, meanwhile, was out the door and on board with CBS. “We wanted Chris for Chris,” Fager said, meaning not because he might bring Scarborough and Brzezinski with him.

Then everything changed. On May 3, Mediaite, a media news Web site, got wind of the possible
Morning Joe
move. The
New York Post
followed up the next morning with a story titled “CBS Woos ‘Joe.’” That stopped the talks. Several people involved say that friends of Steve Burke, the new NBC CEO, called and asked him, incredulously, “You’re going to let these people go?” and that Burke in turn called Capus and told him to somehow make Scarborough and Brzezinski happy at NBC. There was briefly even talk about having them host the Sunday edition of
Weekend Today
, leading in to
Meet the Press
.

While they were trying to decide what to do, Scarborough and Brzezinski visited her father, Zbigniew—a
Morning Joe
regular—at his home in the Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia, for some career counseling. Should they stay or go?

“Let me ask you this question,” the elder Brzezinski said. “Can you interview me for fifteen minutes on the CBS show?”

“No,” they answered in unison. Despite all the talk about a
60 Minutes
sensibility coming to the morning show, they would not have anything near that kind of latitude. CBS was still network television, after all.

“Then don’t go,” Zbigniew said with a shrug. “The thing that makes your show special is that you can do what nobody else can do. Don’t give that up.”

Money also played a big part in their decision to stay. Scarborough walked away with a new contract believed to be worth four million dollars a year, while Brzezinski got half that. For that payout, NBC got not just the right to keep
Morning Joe
on MSNBC, but also the pleasure of watching CBS scramble to come up with a new morning format pretty much from scratch. That spectacle had the potential to be more engaging, to people in the industry at least, than anything the perennial morning loser would put on the air in 2012.

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.”

One especially intriguing part of the launch plan involved starving the old
Early Show
of resources so that it would be especially bad—and thus low-rated—in the second half of 2011. No one would cop to doing this, of course, but it was pretty obvious once CBS literally boarded up the windows on the street-level Fifth Avenue studio it was about to abandon. Erica Hill and the other women and men still inside the studio felt as if they were anchoring a funeral. The idea was to drive viewers away, and thus ensure that the new show would look more popular by comparison. Creating a sense of momentum was important because, as you may recall, every additional hundred thousand viewers between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four were worth roughly ten million dollars in annual advertising revenue.

No one could accuse Fager and the other executives involved with the new show of lacking boldness. Indeed, after they signed Rose as their new team leader in November, some of them got just a wee bit cocky. When reminded by annoying reporters that CBS had never been successful in the morning hours, they were likely to reply that that was because the network had never before asked them to take a crack at the task. They saw themselves as not being constrained by conventional TV thinking.

Rose—who has the perpetual air of a man who stayed out too late last night with a bunch of other bon vivants who would never deign to watch a network morning show—was certainly not a textbook choice for an a.m. anchor. “I get up every morning with a new adventure,” he once said—and then after he called her a cab there was, before the CBS gig came along, a television-less morning routine: a dog-walk, a workout, and some quality time with the newspapers that fed his never-fully-satiated fascination with the world. Rose, it is true, has humble roots (his parents owned an old-fashioned country store in rural North Carolina) and journalistic cred (he freelanced as a TV writer and producer until Bill Moyers hired him to work on
Bill Moyers’ International Report
in 1974, and he appeared on CBS’s
Nightwatch
and
60 Minutes
after that); what’s more he is very smart (Duke University) and very charming (he vacillates between the temperamental Southern cavalier and the courtly Confederate gent). But any focus group worth its salty snacks would chew him up and spit him out in a Paramus, New Jersey (the Paris of focus groups) minute, for he has virtually nothing in common with the flyover-country ladies who make up the bulk of his potential parishioners. Like the jazz musician who was asked to get up early for that famous photograph “A Great Day in Harlem,” Rose seems unaware that there are two ten o’clocks. (That’s how he looks, anyway; for the record, Rose says he’s always arisen between five thirty and six a.m.)

For Fager, Rose’s increased role on commercial TV was the culmination of a long-dreamed dream. CBS executives had talked informally with ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper and CNBC host Erin Burnett about the new show, but like Irish seamen they kept coming back to their somewhat fogbound first love. No one in the television press wrote about the network’s courtship of the PBS star, perhaps because no one who covered the medium could believe it was actually happening, even though Fager, in his enthusiasm, might have readily confirmed the rumor of their long lunches at Michael’s and added that Moonves agreed with him that Rose “could be a guy who could change the way you think about the mornings.”

The wooing of Gayle King, a more conventional choice for the CBS cohosting job, began in June, two months after Fager’s first lunch with Rose. She, too, had solid TV experience—as a longtime anchor in Hartford, Connecticut, and a talk show host on OWN, Winfrey’s struggling cable network—but she also possessed a more traditional morning-friendly manner. Having booked her on
Morning Joe
several times, Licht suggested to Rhodes that they all meet. Rhodes chose the spot—the 21 Club, the same Manhattan institution where Matt Lauer was brought when WNBC wanted to sign him—hoping for the discreet tête-à-tête of legend. But the restaurant was making a promotional film that day (June 30) and their rendezvous was bathed in klieg lights and caught by the cameras. Rhodes said that he thought to himself, “This is really not getting off to a good start if we’re being taped recruiting talent.”