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The TerryReport does not, as a rule, engage in name calling, insults or rants, but the picture which was run with the story in the Times pretty well makes Morgan look like a pompous twit. Let’s hope there is more there than meets the eye (maybe he’s just pompous). Assuming Morgan is a wonderful fellow with lightning quick intelligence, a great interviewing style and warmth on camera, the whole thing will probably still fail within a year.
Why? Parachuting someone into a foreign culture, the United States, and expecting that person to handle the day to day chores of interviewing major news figures is not really a good idea. The selection of Morgan probably means CNN has decided to go far more into entertainment and celebrity crap, with a little newsyness on the side.
Why would Morgan rise to the top here, when we have legions of on camera news people available? Here are some thoughts.
1. PBS, which might serve as a launching board for many talents, is essentially a closed shop. You’ve got the News Hour, which until recent years didn’t even use on air reporters, the better to highlight the anchors. No one gets on the News Hour who would in anyway threaten Jim Lehrer, and no one gets the spotlight, either. Bill Moyers is Bill Moyers and he’s too old to pop into new jobs anyway. There are other efforts on PBS, but, as intended, they are spotty, occasional and subject to cancellation at any moment or season.
2. The local stations don’t, as a rule, do interview shows any more. Even if they did, they would be considered too small time to jump to a national level. LA and New York still do local news interview/talk, but the bigs at CNN don’t see those shows, so they might as well not exist.
3. The commercial networks have their Sunday morning news talkers, but CNN is not likely to hire anyone away from those to go to LKL.
4. Same for the morning shows on the commercial networks.
5. What else is there? The cable/satellite networks don’t do live, don’t do interviews, don’t do much of anything except canned shows they can run three, four, five or more times in various cycles to earn their money back and make profits.
6. King came from radio, but it was unlikely that CNN would have the faith in itself to try that again. They are big time now, so they want someone “big time”.
7. Brain Lamb was not available.
As Nora Desmond said, the screen didn’t get too big for me, I got too big for the screen. We have, despite 100 or more channels, a poverty stricken media scene in the United States. We have media in the US which is over managed and under accomplished. CNN and MSNBC provide ad libbed, off the cuff news/talk shows, but very little in the way of sit-down, concentrated interview shows. The only person worthy of a one-on-one on most news channels is the president of the United States and he is only available once every week or so, and you can’t build something around that, no matter how much Obama wants to be on TeeVee.
Local stations in the US have traditionally been massive money makers, particularly in the top 25 markets. Yet, they get so much of their programming without doing anything from the networks that they are lazy and complacent, or were until recently. Local stations, as a rule, do not generate programming outside of news and when they do, they usually cancel it right away.
As for the commercial networks and PBS, they were mentioned above.
America media, as a rule, is characterized by franticness. Everything is change, everything has to be new and different and, right now, there is a great deal of talk about destroying what is in favor of what might never be. In contrast, European media, and that of other countries like Canada and Australia, still allow television programming as it was done pre-Internet, even while they also look for what the future might be and worry over it, too. France, for example, still has hours and hours of serious talk programming, even in the prime time evening hours. In France, every event deserves a panel discussion, including bike races and other sporting events. Here, we get loud mouthed ex-jocks trying to outdo each other with pithy quips (even they even know what ‘pithy’ means).
So, CNN has to make stupid moves, like naming Piers Morgan to King’s job, in part because of the poverty of media choices in the US and, in part, because they lack the self confidence to reach out and name someone to the job who deserves it by virtue of talent, background and intelligence, rather than in mere name recognition and “exposure”. So be it. It will either go great or be seen as yet another marker in the long term decline of what was once America’s greatest full time news outlet. I wouldn’t put a dime on the first option.
Doug Terry, 9.8.10
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