Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (23 page)

“How far are you from LAX?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Yeesh, that’s cutting it close.”

Shaylor asks the vet to start driving. Miraculously, the man makes it in less than twenty minutes and gives Humphrey the necessary paperwork. But the process takes just a few minutes too long, and the flight leaves without Maddie. Humphrey calls back a couple minutes later with the bad news. Shaylor, undeterred, asks if he’ll fly to New York tomorrow instead. “Tomorrow’s more than fine with me,” says Humphrey.

Shaylor has one more question.

“You would continue to honor doing it exclusively with us, right?” he asks, not wanting to see Maddie standing on Al Roker any time soon.

Humphrey says, “Certainly.”

*  *  *

Booking battles are the war within the war on morning TV.
GMA
and
Today
duke it out over presidents and eyewitnesses, over A-list actors and teens who’ve been expelled for tattoo-related reasons, going to extraordinary lengths to reel in great “gets.” If the bookers have any shame, they have suppressed it. They will drop off homemade cookies and handwritten notes on a crime victim’s front porch. They’ll take campaign strategists out to dinner and get them drunk. They’ll strike up months-long friendships with the family members of the jurors in a sensational murder trial. They’ll flirt, cajole, cry, beg, and their bosses don’t want to know what else, because they believe ratings and their own paychecks are at stake. (The bookers at ABC barely flinched when one of their own bragged of sleeping with an adult witness in a child abuse trial to secure an interview.)

For the biggest bookings, the hosts themselves often make calls and write notes by hand. But the bookers are happy to go a step further for the right guests, and guarantee the interviewer of his or her choice. Is that ethical? Not exactly, but it is closer to the line than a lot of the other stuff they do, such as tailing a guest like a private investigator, sequestering a guest in a hotel room and standing guard at the door—or pretending to be someone else and canceling the other guy’s guest’s plane tickets. “One of my producers nabbed Ted Williams—the homeless man with the ‘golden voice’—when he walked out of a competitor’s studio for a smoke. We basically kidnapped him,” Santina Leuci, the head booker for
GMA
, bragged in 2011. Leuci, according to a colleague, looked for three attributes in her booker hires: “They had to be hot, able to talk their way into or out of anything, and be a chameleon.”

If the circumstances call for it in their opinion, the two leading shows will spend enormous sums of money on bookings. Someone like Humphrey, Maddie the dog’s owner, would just receive free airfare and a couple of nights at a hotel. (Humphrey later complained that
GMA
never paid him back for his flights.) But higher-profile guests are treated to lavish dinners with the producers and personal attention from the hosts. To win the first interview with David Goldman when he brought his eleven-year-old son back to the United States from Brazil after a highly publicized custody battle between 2004 and 2009, NBC paid for a charter flight and put him up in a presidential suite at Universal Studios, an amusement park partly owned by its parent company. The network’s investment, a clear violation of traditional journalistic ethics, paid off handsomely in the ratings.

The shows say they don’t directly pay for nonperforming guests, but they will sometimes license photos or videos from the subjects of news stories—a backdoor way to secure an interview. One of the most embarrassing incidents involved the “Botox Mom,” a California woman who claimed in 2011 to have injected her eight-year-old daughter with Botox. A
GMA
producer called her after her story appeared in the British newspaper the
Sun
(British papers are founts of free story ideas for morning shows) and subsequently offered to pay a broker ten thousand dollars for photos of the eight-year-old receiving injections. The story was assigned to Spencer, who had been back at
GMA
for only a few days. “It does sound unreal,” Spencer said on the air—but then introduced the segment anyway. It
was
unreal, the woman later claimed in an interview with TMZ. “Honestly, I don’t even know what Botox is,” she said, alleging that the newspaper had scripted the whole thing and paid her two hundred dollars to participate. ABC executives didn’t know what to believe, but they admitted privately that the episode was embarrassing for Spencer and for
GMA
. The ten-thousand-dollar payment, thankfully, never went through. Ben Sherwood came out two months later and said he’d banned the licensing practice, with exceptions to be granted only in extraordinary circumstances.

Sometimes the networks publicly condemned booker behavior, but said very different things behind the scenes. See, for instance, what happened in 2002 when NBC, ABC, and CBS all vied for the first on-camera interview with two teenage girls who were abducted and raped north of Los Angeles.
Today
secured the first interview thanks to Couric and Gloria De Leon, a star booker in NBC’s Burbank, California, bureau. Twenty-six years old at the time, De Leon was in charge of “babysitting” (her boss’ word) one of the girls before the interview. “Katie was on a plane from New York,” De Leon recalled, when she took the girl shopping. Normally NBC’s standards prohibit giving gifts to interview subjects, for gifts can be construed as indirect payments. (Of course, so can airline tickets and hotel accommodations and licenses for photos, but the standards are the standards.) But De Leon bought a sixty-dollar pair of jeans for the girl, knowing that the girl’s favorite pair were in police custody because they were stained with blood. “She wanted to wear jeans in the interview to show she was the same woman that she was before the rape,” De Leon said. The family of the victim couldn’t afford to buy her a new pair, so De Leon did. “I thought it was a nice gesture,” she said. It was their little secret—until one of the bookers from the other networks called the girl’s mother in another attempt to snag the interview away from NBC. The mother told the booker that her daughter had gone “shopping with Gloria from the
Today
show.”

That tidbit must have made its way back to the rival network, because within hours reporters from
USA Today
and other news outlets were on the line with Jonathan Wald, the top producer at the time, demanding to know whether NBC had paid for a pair of jeans. Wald thought no—but after talking to De Leon, he had to call back and say, “I was wrong, I was misinformed, we bought the pants.” Wald had to call back De Leon, too, and say, “We’re going to have to suspend you.”

“This was a rape victim!” De Leon said years later, still amazed by the sequence of events. “Back in those days we were doing thousand-dollar dinners” with potential guests, she added. But the standards are the standards. She was publicly slapped on the wrist with a week’s suspension; the newspaper reporters were told that. They weren’t told this: “When I got back, NBC gave me my first six-figure contract for being, in their words, ‘a bulldog,’” De Leon said. “I can go to war thanks to the lessons I learned,” she added.

*  *  *

At 1:21 a.m. in New York, Nalty calls in from LA. “Wheels up!” she announces over Shaylor’s speakerphone. The
Dancing with the Stars
cast members are now on their way here.

“We’ve never left this late,” Nalty tells Shaylor. “William Levy”—one of the dancers—“was taking his sweet little time in his trailer.”

Shaylor says he’s worried that they are not going to make it on time. To have the dancers at the
GMA
studio in Times Square by seven, to shoot their red-carpet entrance, the charter needs to land by six fifteen a.m.

“I just told the pilot, you have to make this,” Nalty says. “They’ll catch it up in the air.”

“They’re not drinking?” Shaylor asks.

“No.”

After he hangs up, Shaylor looks at me and says, “Sometimes they drink.”

At 4:40 a.m. Shaylor’s boss Cibrowski arrives at work at
GMA
’s Times Square studio. At 5:04 Stephanopoulos walks into Cibrowski’s office. He asks the same question he asks Cibrowski every morning at this time: “What’s happening?” And today, an extra question: is the charter on time?

At six thirty Cibrowski and Denise Rehrig, the senior broadcast producer, relocate to the show’s bunker-like control room. Around them a dozen producers, writers, and technicians fiddle with graphics, camera angles, and scripted intros. They get good news: the
Dancing
cast members are off the plane and in a convoy of cars on the way to Times Square. The red-carpet arrival will go off without a hitch. One floor below, in the studio, Robin Roberts and the other hosts are practicing their lines and touching up their makeup. And a few blocks away the
Today
hosts and crew are doing exactly the same things. Thanks to a small television monitor in a corner of the
GMA
control room that streams the feed
Today
is sending out to its network affiliates, Cibrowski and his crew can see them in their ritual labors. Right now Matt Lauer and Ann Curry are proofreading scripts and primping. NBC no doubt has a similar peephole into
GMA
. In this business, you always keep one eye on the other guy.

Chapter 12

Invincible

Sometimes it seemed as if the only difference between a big-time college football coach and a network news president was that the coach made more money. “We’re going to win the championship!” Ben Sherwood assured the team at
GMA
many times in late 2011 and early 2012. “Two things have to happen—we have to keep growing and they have to keep declining,” added the ABC News chief. “But we can do it! It can be done!”

Taking this position, it should be noted, put Sherwood in direct opposition to Steve Capus, his former colleague at NBC News who had no small amount of antipathy for him. Capus dismissed ABC—and particularly Sherwood—as being desperate for a win, and swore that NBC wouldn’t let them have one. Asked what would happen if
Today
ever dropped into second place in the ratings race behind
GMA
, Capus told Bill Carter of
The New York Times
, “That is a hypothetical that we are not going to have to deal with. It’s not going to happen.” When Capus talked this way, though, he was in a sense drowned out by the sound of Sherwood, over at ABC, chanting, “It. Can. Be. Done.” In an interview for this book, Sherwood said, “If you ask my colleagues what sentence they’ve heard come out of my mouth more than any sentence, it’s ‘We’re going to win the championship.’” Then he leaned in close and said, “We’re going to win the championship.” Sherwood has excellent taste in cologne.

Sherwood’s confidence and enthusiasm were all well and good, but cohost Robin Roberts kept looking at the numbers in January and early February 2012—as almost everyone associated with both shows did—and for her this negated the effect of the ABC News president’s rousing locker-room-style speeches. The numbers were barely budging. Despite the fact that the
GMA
team was starting to jell, and the research showed that the audience was liking the softer stuff the show served up with a smile, the ratings gap remained stuck between half and three-quarters of a million viewers. Still.

“I’ve always felt” that
GMA
could beat
Today
, Roberts said. “Honestly.” But why, she wondered, hadn’t it happened? Would it ever?

By this time, ten years into her tenure at
GMA
, Roberts found all the Nielsen talk numbing. “When I came over from ESPN, where we were just such a dominant force, we didn’t talk about ratings; we didn’t have to; we just killed everybody,” she said.

In 2005, when Roberts became the third anchor at
GMA
, with Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson, and the show got within about forty thousand daily viewers of
Today
, a lot of people at ABC had predicted a tidal wave of numbers that would sweep the alphabet network to victory. But then the tide had gone back out, the gap had gone to half a million and then a million again, and a sense of profound defeat had hung over the set. The dark clouds never overwhelmed Roberts, though. “I always felt good about what we were putting on the air,” she said. Still, she admitted, “it was disappointing that we weren’t making inroads.”

Eventually, she said, she resigned herself to the difficulty of changing people’s viewing habits. “I had longtime friends,
great
friends, who were not watching my show. Why? Because that’s morning television.” (Translation: her friends were watching
Today
.) “I’m thinking, if somebody that
knows
me won’t watch…then I started thinking, ‘Well, you can’t take it personally. People do have their routines.’”

Of all the great battles in history, the one the morning show wars of the last few years most closely resembled was the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. Foreman was lean and mean in those days, and Ali went in as the decided underdog. But Ali came up with a game plan—the famous and never-before-seen rope-a-dope technique—and he stuck with it, and finally there was an unforgettable moment in the eighth round when all of a sudden you saw that the big guy was in trouble. Something had happened—a particularly well-measured punch from Ali, perhaps, combined with the cumulative effect of all that earlier rope-a-doping—that made the champion wobble, and gave the challenger fresh energy, and made the spectators gasp.

For
GMA
, the equivalent of that table-turning eighth-round moment was the 2012 Academy Awards, broadcast by ABC to nearly forty million viewers on the evening of Sunday, February 26. Roberts was on the red carpet in front of the Kodak Theater, interviewing nominees George Clooney, Melissa McCarthy, and Viola Davis, and later winner Octavia Spencer. But more significantly for
GMA
, Roberts also, despite feeling especially fatigued, anchored the next morning live from LA. That broadcast, during which she took viewers behind the scenes of the post-awards-show parties, drew a year-high rating. The next day Roberts was back in the New York studio to help announce that spring’s
Dancing with the Stars
contestants. The show was on a roll.