Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV

by Brian Stelter

  Viewers didn’t reject the pair, who called themselves Thelma and Louise, but the gap between GMA and Today was as stubborn as ever. To the strivers at GMA, the competition seemed downright indestructible.

  As morning show personalities, Roberts and Sawyer were a study in contrasts. Despite the warmth she projected on screen and her ability to connect with viewers through the camera, Roberts kept her private life private. But she did share with the audience something that most television personalities don’t: her faith. A lifelong Presbyterian, Roberts was open about her belief in God and the power of prayer.

  Although she worked hard enough, Roberts wasn’t a workaholic, nor did she seem quite as neurotic about breaking the NBC streak as some of her colleagues—as, say, Sawyer, who was described by one of her best work-friends as “one of the hardest-working people on Earth,” but also “an infinite well of need.” Sawyer was famous for calling in to the GMA assignment desk at literally all hours. Tom Cibrowski, who rose in the GMA ranks before taking over the show in 2012, recalled how Sawyer figured into the first date he had with his future wife Julie in 2005. Heading out the door to a jazz bar on Manhattan’s East Side, he told Sawyer, “I have a date tonight so I won’t be available.” Usually, he explained, she liked to talk once or twice a night. “OK, OK!” she told him.

  An hour or so later, however, when Cibrowski sneaked a look at his phone in the men’s room, there was a message from Sawyer. “Can you call me?”

  * * *

  The Katrina story wasn’t the only adversity that Roberts would face in front of the camera. On July 31, 2007, she announced on the show that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery a few days later, and on August 20 she returned to work and ran a roundtable discussion among cancer survivors. When her hair began falling out as a result of chemotherapy, she admitted she was wearing a wig, but then declined to talk about it anymore. As she said in a blog post, “I never want to distract you from the story I am covering.” But her story was riveting, and as she continued to show up each day and do good work, viewers felt more closely connected to her, an important side benefit for a morning host.

  Two years later Thelma and Louise went their separate ways. Sawyer was offered the anchor chair at World News that had just been vacated by the retiring Gibson, a posting she had secretly coveted even before her old cohost was put there in 2006. She was named Gibson’s successor in September. GMA assembled a spectacular televised send-off for Sawyer, whose last day on the morning shift was December 12, 2009—coincidentally, the fourteenth anniversary of NBC’s ratings streak.

  By the time Sawyer told her TV audience that she would be leaving GMA at the end of the year, the wooing of George Stephanopoulos had already begun. The night before the announcement came out, when he was in a Washington, DC, pizza place called 2Amys, picking up dinner for his two daughters, ages four and seven (his wife, the actress and comedian Ali Wentworth, was out of town) the White House–aide-turned-ABC-political-all-star got a call from ABC News president David Westin.

  “Shortly, Charlie’s going to announce that he’s leaving. I wanted you to know,” Westin told him. “And we want to talk to you about what’s next.”

  In that brief call, Westin didn’t mention GMA. Nor did he bring up the show in their follow-up talks, which initially centered on making Stephanopoulos the permanent substitute for Sawyer on World News, since it was no secret that Stephanopoulos, then the host of the Sunday morning political interview show This Week, had his eye on the nightly anchor chair. It was only after a few phone calls, when they met face-to-face for the first time about the changes, that Westin asked Stephanopoulos to think about GMA. The news president had a short list of candidates that included the current GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo, weekend GMA anchor Bill Weir, and weekend World News anchor David Muir, but Stephanopoulos was his first choice by a wide margin. “George stood out as the clear choice because he was the strongest anchor,” Westin said. “He brought his special expertise in politics and public policy issues, as well as great range and warmth.”

  Perhaps one reason Westin hesitated so long before mentioning the cohost job at GMA is that he didn’t think Stephanopoulos would believe him. In many ways it seemed like an outrageously poor fit, the former spokesman for President Bill Clinton chitchatting with a former ESPN reporter and matching wits with a weather guy about what they’d watched on TV the previous evening. Somehow it was hard to imagine the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, a brilliant student of government who had gone on to become the salutatorian of his graduating class at Columbia, describing lawsuits filed over injurious lap dances, interviewing Kim Kardashian, and telling America how to waterproof its sneakers.

  Wentworth recalled the first conversation she had with her husband after Westin dropped his little bombshell.

  “I think they might want me to do Good Morning America,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not going to do it, are you?”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t just the ultra-mellow tone of early-morning television that Stephanopoulos, more accustomed to political matchups, had to consider—or the fact that he didn’t seem to resonate in the same key as Roberts, or even that at five feet and ten inches she was four inches taller than he. There were also practical considerations pertaining to him and his family. He and Wentworth had just bought a handsome new house in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood and they didn’t want to uproot their daughters. During the fall of 2009, Stephanopoulos went to Westin several times and said, “I don’t think this is right.”

  Westin heard him out, but according to Wentworth, the entreaties from ABC “became less of ‘Would you,’ and more ‘You will.’” Looking back on the discussions, Stephanopoulos says he was persuaded by the sheer reach of GMA—so many viewers, so much airtime—and “by the chance to help create something new there.” The money also influenced his thinking, as it always does. (Stephanopoulos is believed to make more than five million dollars a year.) There were other selling points, too. The move to New York made him a bigger player in breaking news coverage. And, he said, “it was not lost on me that many, many anchors of evening programs cut their teeth on the morning programs.” All that said, when he signed up he was still worried about feeling like a cod liver oil pill in a jar of jelly beans.

  Jim Murphy, the GMA show-runner, was not opposed to the pairing per se, but he did balk at giving Stephanopoulos and Roberts equal billing and equal weight. He argued to Westin that the show should either be built around Stephanopoulos, the super-studious hard-news nerd with two children, or be built around Roberts, the laid-back jock with no children—but warned that they must make a choice. Westin admitted there were “substantial doubts” about the pairing, both inside ABC and out. But, he said, “I was confident that they would come together as a team because they share a fundamental decency and respect for others. Each would appreciate what the other one brought to the program.”

  The odd couple actually held their own. In their first quarter together, that is from January to March 2010, GMA was 1.24 million viewers behind Today; in their fourth quarter, October to December 2010, GMA was 930,000 behind in the two shows’ combined pool of eleven million viewers. Progress! “In a world where most shows were losing audience, we weren’t—we were closing the gap, at least a little bit,” Stephanopoulos said.

  * * *

  Former GMA executive producer Ben Sherwood, watching from home in Los Angeles, wasn’t privy to all the numbers (though his friends still at the network kept him pretty up-to-date). But as a graduate student of the genre, he could see NBC feeling the pressure, and, despite his competitive feelings, he loved to watch the pros at the Today show bear down under the threat. He thought their taking the streak so seriously, as seriously as he had once tried to end it, showed class, that there was “an honor to the arena, to the game, to the war, whatever you wanted to call it.” To put together hundreds of weeks of consecutive wins, you have to believe in yourself, Sherwood said
, and never let up. “They won on July fourth week. They won on Christmas week. They won every week. And they would not compromise,” he said. “They would put Matt there on July fourth week. They would put Meredith there on Christmas week. They put their frontline team there because the streak mattered. Because they could not let it stop.”

  Like any other civilian, Sherwood read of David Westin’s departure from ABC News through the media. Westin resigned in September 2010, a few months after finishing a massive wave of layoffs mandated by Disney. (Nearly four hundred of the news division’s 1,500 people were let go.) Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, was just beginning her search for Westin’s replacement when Sherwood called her. On the hottest day in Los Angeles since record-keeping began in 1877—the thermometer in his Subaru Forester read 114 degrees—​Sherwood came in for a talk at ABC’s headquarters in Burbank. “I met with Anne at the recommendation of some people who thought that I, not in the business anymore, could offer some thoughts to her about the news division,” Sherwood said.

  His conversation with Sweeney was wide-ranging. They talked about GMA, about World News, about the ABC News iPad app, about the qualities the next news division president should have. But they did not talk about Sherwood as president. “I was not a candidate,” he said.

  But less than two months later, he asked to become a candidate, assuming Sweeney was still looking for one. She was, and she brought him in for a three-hour interview. Sherwood emerged the front-runner for the job, so Sweeney invited him and her boss Bob Iger to dinner. The subject of GMA, the news division’s most profitable program, came up practically before the waiter could take their orders. Sherwood didn’t promise Iger and Sweeney to make GMA number one in a specific amount of time. But he did say that if he got the news president’s job the morning show would be a very high priority for him. Very high. That shouldn’t have surprised anybody within earshot. After all, Sherwood had unfinished business in the mornings—he had previously brought GMA to within forty thousand viewers of Today, but hadn’t broken the streak.

  “I thought there were opportunities to make the show grow,” Sherwood said later. “And I told them that I thought we would ultimately be victorious.”

  Sherwood recalled that Iger wanted him to get specific: “It’s hard to find new talent. Who would you hire?”

  Sherwood happened to have an answer ready. “He already works for you—at ESPN.”

  Chapter 9

  Hacky Sack

  Sitting at home in LA, finishing his book about survivors, listening to his family and friends talk about what they liked to watch on TV and what they didn’t, and surveying the landscape with an eye toward getting back into the game, Sherwood had come to the conclusion that the thirty-eight-year-old ESPN anchor Josh Elliott was not just a good talker and a juicy slab of beefsteak but indeed the future of morning television. And this he said, more or less, to Iger and Sweeney at dinner. The bosses must have liked what they heard, because come the first week of December, Sherwood was named the new president of ABC News. Now all Sherwood had to do was convince Elliott to give up cable sports for network morning TV. Considering how ambitious Elliott was known to be, and the fact that he had long been fixated on GMA in particular as a venue for his talents, this would prove about as difficult as convincing Matt Lauer to take a day off golfing with Bryant Gumbel, or getting Charlie Rose to say yes to just a splash more Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

  Sherwood wanted Elliott not just for all the tall, dark handsomeness he would bring to the show, but as an ingredient that would alter the chemistry in and around the studio. Roberts and Stephanopoulos managed to be dissimilar without being complementary—​you might say ​they were like pieces from different puzzles—and although the ratings gap wasn’t getting any worse on their watch (they’d gotten it under a million!) it wasn’t going to go away altogether. In fact, when Sherwood arrived, some people on the long-suffering GMA staff wondered whether he would just fire the odd couple and start over from scratch. Given the show’s fifteen-year losing streak, and Sherwood’s passion for winning, anything seemed possible.

  Let’s start with Stephanopoulos. He freely admitted to friends that he didn’t enjoy the softer parts of GMA, in particular the eight a.m. hour of reality show recaps, parenting tips, and celebrity interviews. Still, he took the job as seriously as any mission he’d ever undertaken. In production meetings he’d sometimes ask, “Why are we doing this?” He knew the segments weren’t meant for him, they were meant for stay-at-home moms and, although the network craved women in their thirties and forties, grandmoms. Most men tuned out by seven thirty, he discovered through ABC’s research; most college-​​​​​educated viewers tuned out by eight. But he still wanted to know why the stories were relevant to the moms and grandmoms in the audience. “What I respect,” he said, “is when people can explain to me why it’s important or why it’s of interest to our audience. I can’t always be persuaded, but I’m open to persuasion.”

  When Stephanopoulos moved to New York for GMA, he and Wentworth bought an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his early-morning schedule in mind. They wanted one in which what would be his closet, and the bathroom, weren’t attached to the master bedroom. That way, in theory at least, he could get up very early and get dressed without disturbing his wife. As soon as he started doing the show, Stephanopoulos established a daily pattern. He would get up, without help from an alarm clock, at 2:35 each working day, an hour earlier than his cohosts on GMA. (If he had any qualms about working harder than the rest, he kept them to himself.) Then he would slip out of his rather fabulous Italian neoclassical bed, trying not to disturb his wife of ten years, tiptoe past the bedrooms where his daughters slept, and go into the living room to check his e-mail and certain news sites, to see if anything significant had happened in the world since his nine p.m. bedtime. With that done, he would sit cross-legged and meditate for about ten minutes. (Meditation had been part of Stephanopoulos’s regimen ever since he joined GMA. He said it helps center him and gives him energy to get through the day.) In the kitchen he would fire up a kettle and load a French press with coffee. The resulting brew, said his wife, “has the consistency of chocolate pudding.” Then he’d swing back into the bedroom to kiss her goodbye, oftentimes waking her up despite his best efforts—the curse of the morning TV spouse. It was a sweet and loving ritual that ended with his arriving in a pop-culture fun house that he didn’t totally understand, and didn’t want to.

  Roberts shared his disinterest. The former ESPN host and self-professed jock outwardly had little in common with the moms who made up GMA’s base. She “grudgingly participated” in the studious goofiness of the eight a.m. hour, one of her colleagues said, “but it’s not really what she does or who she is.”

  But fluff-adverseness was about all Stephanopoulos and Roberts had in common. When the ABC News president looked at Elliott he saw the mortar that could make those bricks stick together. A chiseled six-foot-three-inch California boy with a smile that, to hear the besotted Sherwood tell it, is equally endearing to women, men, children, and small fur-bearing animals, he relates to the camera in an inoffensively swaggering way that makes you wonder if he has a tattoo that says, “Born to Throw It to the Weather Guy.” And yet as Elliott, who doesn’t mind talking about himself, will tell you, as a child he dreamed of being a writer, and he says he still thinks of himself as “an ink-stained wretch.” Elliott majored in English literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara and covered sports for its newspaper, the Daily Nexus. After earning a master’s in journalism at Columbia, he took a job at Sports Illustrated, where he struck one perhaps envious colleague as “the kind of print journalist who wants to get out of print and get into something that gets you more money and more women as quickly as possible.”

  Around 2002, Elliott hired a TV agent, Sandy Montag, who introduced him to the ESPN empire by way of a panelist gig on the daily sports roundtable show Around the Horn.
Montag thought he saw marketability, and asked, “If you ever wanted to do any more television, what would it be?”

  “I don’t know, anchor Good Morning America?” Elliott said. He thought the idea not so absurd since he had seen Roberts make the crossover from sports to news anchor. But the GMA job was one of the most coveted in the industry by the people who had the kind of hair Elliott had, and Montag just laughed.

  Elliott’s dreams seemed less humorous in mid-2008, when he became a coanchor of ESPN’s signature newscast, SportsCenter, between the hours of nine a.m. and noon—the closest thing the network had to a morning show. Thanks to the Disney connection he even got to fill in on GMA once, on a weekend in early 2010, and he enjoyed the experience, but months went by and he never heard from anyone at the show about filling in again.

  * * *

  Elliott and his SportsCenter cohost Hannah Storm rang in 2011 in Pasadena, California, where they were leading ABC’s coverage of the Rose Bowl. After the telecast they shared a ride to the airport and the pair, who had worked together two and a half years at that point, started talking about their futures in television.

  “What would you want to do?” Storm asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he responded. “Maybe I’d want to do Good Morning America.” What he hadn’t told Storm—or anyone really—was that he’d met with the head of talent recruitment for ABC News, Amy Entelis, a few weeks before.

  “Do you know anything about this new guy, Ben Sherwood?” Elliott asked Storm. She said she had met Sherwood socially a couple of times and that he seemed quite smart. Elliott, who had done a little research on the new guy, seemed to think so, too: the man was “writing books and they’re making them into movies,” he said.