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

by Brian Stelter

  Then Cibrowski flipped a switch and spoke into all five hosts’ ears at once. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Lara Spencer said. “I mean, it brings tears to my eyes.” The hosts shouted, “Yes!” and hugged each other as the eight thirty half hour was about to begin. “The crew didn’t know why at first,” Spencer recalled, because Cibrowski had wanted the hosts to know before anyone else. An ABC photographer Cibrowski had stationed on the set shot a photo of the quintet together a moment later, their index fingers raised in the air to say, “We’re number one!” Roberts, who alone clenched her right hand in a fist, looked the happiest of all.

  Elliott later said that he felt it was “symbolic” that Cibrowski had told Roberts the good news a moment or two before the others. Both Cibrowski and Roberts had been at GMA for a full decade. They were “the people who had worked so hard just to, you know, get us in position,” Elliott said. The new anchor saw the Nielsen challenge as something akin to climbing Mount Everest, where “there are like three or four base camps,” he said. “You don’t just leave camp and go up to the top. There’s something like the Death Zone. It’s the last camp to the summit when, you know, you’ve already gone up twenty-five thousand feet. But the last few thousand are the hardest. And boy, did we prove that.” Roberts, as Elliott saw it, was both their Sherpa and their Edmund Hillary, guiding and inspiring them toward the top. Even those less fond of tortured analogies agreed. The loudest applause was reserved for Roberts when a couple hundred ABC News staffers gathered on the fifth floor at eleven a.m. for a champagne toast hastily arranged by Schneider, who had cried tears of joy—and relief—in his office when the win was confirmed.

  Sherwood began the celebration by naming the young GMA producers who had been in elementary school when the Today show started its winning streak. He mentioned the length in weeks, 852, and practically roared, “It ended officially this morning.”

  Almost all work in the newsroom stopped for the next thirty minutes. A camera crew beamed the celebration to ABC bureaus in other cities. A staffer along the back wall wondered, “How long have they had that champagne here?”

  Sherwood said the day represented a “victory for the whole organization” and credited, among many others, Goldston, who he said had “reimagined and reinvigorated this program.” Goldston, in turn, called for another round of applause for Sherwood: “We would have never gotten here without him.”

  Sherwood, reading from index cards, thanked his predecessor David Westin and former GMA host Diane Sawyer, among many others, and also thanked prime-time shows like Desperate Housewives and Dancing with the Stars. “How about a round of applause for Marc Cherry?” he said at one point, referring to the creator of Housewives. When Cibrowski spoke, he added one more thank-you: for Tim Tebow, the show’s well-hyped guest the prior Friday. It was then the hosts’ turns, beginning with Roberts, the woman Sherwood introduced as “our captain.”

  “Ben,” she said, “when you came in we had a conversation, and you promised this moment. And you are a man of your word.”

  Then, to those assembled, she said, “If you have been on GMA, if you have cut a piece, if you have answered a phone, if you’ve had anything to do with GMA over the last sixteen years, please raise your hand.” As nearly everyone within sight raised a hand, she smiled and said, “You see that? You see that? It is all about team. And all of you share this very moment.”

  Later Elliott remarked, “I feel almost as though I should apologize. I only had to wait fifty weeks for this.” As those in the room chuckled, Spencer, the other new kid, agreed and said they looked forward to the weeks when they wouldn’t have to wait until Thursday to know the show had won.

  “This is one important step,” Sherwood said when he got the microphone back. “But here’s the deal. Back in 1994, when the Today show beat Good Morning America after a five-year run by GMA, what happened then, through 1994, was this brawl. They fought it out. What happened this week is that we knocked down the undisputed heavyweight champion. So what happens when you knock down the champion for a week? What do they do? Are they going to stay down? No. They’re going to come back at us and they’re going to want to kill us.” There was knowing laughter around the room. “So a brawl is about to ensue, and it’s gonna be a fight. And that’s what we want. Because before we can get to a place where we win consistently and we don’t gather every time we do it, we’re going to have to fight very, very hard for a very long time.”

  Sherwood led a toast to NBC. “They were the champs for 852 straight weeks. We owe them respect and we owe them a big round of applause for what they did.” A not-quite-as-big round of applause followed. Stephanopoulos, raising an unopened bottle, said, “Let’s start another streak!”

  * * *

  Roberts had to hurry to her doctor’s office right after the champagne toasts. There she was told definitively that she had MDS. “That’s usually life,” she told me a couple months later, right between a GMA taping and a chemotherapy session. “You can dream, hope, and pray for how you think something’s going to be, and how it actually happens or doesn’t happen is usually so far from what you thought it was going to be.” Roberts, resting in her dressing room after the show one day, looked at the photo taken of the cast together on the nineteenth, with her fist in the air and Elliott’s and Champion’s arms around her back. Copies of the photo had been placed in silver frames and given to all the hosts. “I so look at that picture differently than everybody else,” Roberts said. “Because that is the day that it was like, ‘Yeah, it’s MDS. Yes, you’re going to have a bone marrow transplant. Yes, you’re going to be out for a chunk of time. We don’t know when.’ It was all this…it was such a gray area. It was just maddening.”

  On the day of the historic win, no one at the show except Champion and a couple of her personal producers knew she was sick. After the doctor’s appointment, at about two, Roberts texted him and Spencer. “Where are you guys?” They happened to be getting a manicure and pedicure together about half a mile away. Roberts walked up to the nail salon, Spencer recalled, “and she just burst into laughter and shook her head, because there we were, Sam and I, with our feet in the tub.”

  Roberts headed home, and Elliott met up with Champion and Spencer for an afternoon of pre-celebration before the staff party at six p.m. Cibrowski’s secret party planners had reserved a rooftop penthouse overlooking the Hudson River on Sixty-Seventh Street, an easy walk from the office. It also happened to be a few doors down from Roberts’s apartment building.

  Roberts knew she had to go. But, understandably, “I wasn’t really into it,” she said, and as soon as she hit the street she thought of turning back. Then her doorman said, “Hey, your friends are here!”

  There in front of her were Champion, Spencer, and Elliott. It looked like a self-referential post–eight a.m. spot on GMA. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, they came to come get me!’” Actually, they were lost, and a little tipsy, but Roberts didn’t realize that at the time, and she was moved by their seeming thoughtfulness. “So I think, like, ‘Oh c’mon Robin, suck it up and go to the party.’ I hugged them and we’re walking down the street and people are shouting out at us. Then I realized, ‘You guys didn’t come to pick me up, did you?’ And they say, ‘Oh, you live here?’”

  The six-to-eight party went until nine, then ten, then eleven. There were no speeches this time, just drinking and dancing. (Though there was a little bit of work done: ABC had obtained an exclusive photo of George Zimmerman taken the night of the Trayvon Martin shooting, so a few producers had to confer about it. The photo wound up being the lead story the following morning.)

  “We had worked so incredibly hard for that moment,” Roberts said. She didn’t want to spoil it by telling anyone about her diagnosis. She came close to telling Sherwood, but “I was like, ‘How in the world can I say something right now to him?’ I mean, this is his shining moment. He came back for this.” Still, Sherwood said later that after spending time with Roberts that evening he �
��went home with a sense of apprehension that something was up.” It would be six weeks before Roberts told anyone else at ABC but Cibrowski about her condition. (“I needed somebody to know,” she said, “in case I woke up one morning and I didn’t want to come in.”)

  Roberts was back at work the next morning for a hungover edition of GMA. “These people are dragging today,” director Jeff Winn said at the end of the first hour. In the control room a row behind Winn, Cibrowski and his lieutenant Denise Rehrig discussed how to handle the show’s on-air announcement of the big win. “I don’t want to mess it up,” Cibrowski told her, knowing that his boss, Sherwood, and his boss’s boss were taking it very seriously. They would divide the happy task: one host would thank the viewers, another ABC’s stations—after all, they, too, had been in second place for so long—and another would mention the Other Place. During a commercial break at 7:25, the writer stationed next to Rehrig, Simone Swink, typed out, “We tip our hat to our colleagues at NBC for their amazing streak…”

  ABC didn’t hear much from NBC the week the win became official. Today flirted with the idea of congratulating GMA on air, but decided that would just draw more attention to the war. Cibrowski did get an e-mail from Bell on Thursday that said, “We want to send you something, where do we send it?” Bravely, he gave them a correct address.

  Later that day a bottle of champagne showed up, not from NBC or from Bell, but from Matt Lauer. His congratulatory card called the win “a big deal” and added jokingly, “Not sure if you want to drink this or hit yourselves over the head with it.”

  If Cibrowski chose the former option, he needed to chug the stuff quickly. While GMA was celebrating its historic victory, Today was…winning. Lauer and his colleagues vaulted right back to first place April 16 through 20, winning by 243,000 viewers and raising the possibility in the minds of some at NBC that the prior week’s fall to second place had just been a lucky break for ABC. NBC’s news release about the ratings noted that Today had been number one for “853 out of 854 weeks.” And for even longer in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic: 886 weeks. The gap in the demo was 379,000—GMA still had a long way to go in the viewer category that mattered most.

  Chapter 14

  The Call from the

  White House

  “For new democracies,” George Stephanopoulos said in April, “the second election is more important than the first.”

  The GMA host knew that his show’s single victory in April wouldn’t mean much to executives and advertisers unless the same result could be achieved again (and again). Which is why April 23 through 27, 2012, was one of the single most important weeks in GMA’s thirty-seven-year history.

  “Great News!!!” the ABC researcher Amy Miller e-mailed Sherwood and the other network executives on Thursday afternoon, the twenty-sixth, when the second draft of Wednesday’s ratings arrived. She wasn’t kidding: after three days GMA was ahead of Today by 220,000 viewers and in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic it trailed by only fifty-six thousand. GMA’s streak-breaking win earlier in the month was looking less and less fluke-ish.

  ABC was going all out to win the week at hand. Robin Roberts, feeling bone-tired but trying to hide it from her colleagues, was on a flight to California when Miller’s encouraging e-mail arrived. Roberts was set to interview Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s new organ donation initiative for a segment that would air on GMA the following Tuesday. She was scheduled to talk to him in the afternoon, then sleep Thursday night at the home of close friends who lived near Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto. Friday she had planned to take off. She sorely needed to gather her strength. But with a second weekly win within reach, Roberts and Tom Cibrowski decided that it would be best for the show if she was back at the anchor desk in New York on Friday morning. He scurried to line up a charter flight that would get her back in time.

  The brawl-for-it-all that Ben Sherwood had predicted was now on. The two shows had battled the weekend before over Meow the cat, the morbidly obese tabby. Today had won, and flown Meow and a veterinarian from Santa Fe to New York (the cat had its own seat) for a Tuesday-morning segment. When Cibrowski found out about that early on Monday morning, he had ordered his staff to crash a segment about Meow for his show. Using video from a New Mexico TV station, they did, and got it on the air by 7:20, beating Today by half an hour. True, only Today could boast that it had Meow in person, sprawled right next to Matt Lauer (who, sensing the sentiment of the average viewer, tut-tutted over her imperiled health). A GMA segment producer said semi-​seriously that she had tried to steal the cat from Today, as producers have been known to do with guests (sending a car to the hotel sometimes works). Another producer replied playfully, “Probably hard to do a grab-and-run with Meow.”

  Later that day the two shows scrambled to book a University of Colorado student, Kolbi Zerbest, who had been blamed for accidentally spilling yogurt on President Obama during a campaign stop. The photos of Obama good-naturedly cleaning up the mess with a napkin were the closest the morning shows would get that day to covering culture. But GMA got outfoxed by a young Today producer named Wesley Oliver, who spotted Zerbest’s sorority sisters writing about the incident on Twitter and contacted them there. Zerbest, they told him, was by chance being initiated into the sorority the same day; Oliver learned how to reach her and arranged for her to be on the next morning, from NBC’s station in Denver. A Today booker handled the follow-up, which involved pleading with Zerbest not to stay up late drinking the night before: “We can’t put you on the air drunk! You can celebrate tomorrow.” On the show, Ann Curry earnestly praised the young woman who was known for fifteen minutes or so as “Yogurt Girl” for coming forward and accepting blame for the spill.

  * * *

  With a bleary-eyed Roberts back from California, Cibrowski decided to try something new and, by morning show standards, bold on April 27: have all five hosts of GMA on set when the show started at seven a.m. Normally Lara Spencer didn’t appear until seven thirty or eight a.m., but Cibrowski wanted to emphasize the friendliness of his cast—all the more so since Today was getting grief from viewers for Lauer and Curry’s dysfunctional relationship. One GMA producer said that seeing the two of them together was like watching a “hostage video,” but he didn’t say which he thought was the hostage. In e-mails and tweets, said people at NBC, it was Curry who got the more unrestrained criticism. The sight of the GMA hosts together, Cibrowski hoped, could serve as an antidote to that toxic atmosphere. The arrangement soon became a daily thing. Chirped Spencer, “I love that we are saying from the top of the show, we are a team.”

  But could they once again be the A-Team? By 6:57 a.m. on Friday the twenty-seventh, all five hosts were on set, but Spencer didn’t have the “hellos”—the partly scripted, partly ad-libbed introduction to the show. “Guys, Lara needs the hellos right now,” writer Simone Swink said. While the paper script was rushed to Spencer, Cibrowski spoke to all the hosts through their earpieces. “Lara has a very quick tease…and then we get right to the headlines.” “Here we go,” said Denise Rehrig. With ten seconds until airtime, Cibrowski spoke in the hosts’ ears one more time. “Good luck, everybody,” he said solemnly, as if addressing space-bound astronauts. With the stakes unusually high, the tension in the control room was palpable.

  For the most part, GMA that morning stuck to its formula of teases and kills. The teases are so frequent that they can make a morning show seem like one long promise of what’s coming up in a minute; the kills are stories that start out on the rundown but get lost along the way. GMA is purposely overbooked to make it seem faster and more brimming with great stuff than Today. “If we slow down in the first half hour, people flip the channel,” a producer said matter-of-factly. A couple minutes into the Friday show, Cibrowski killed one correspondent’s introduction and told legal analyst Dan Abrams, who was on to talk about the John Edwards trial, “We’re very tight so we’re going to give you about a minute twenty.” Fifteen mi
nutes in, with the show still running over, Rehrig, the timekeeper-in-chief, cut another intro and complained aloud when Sam Champion’s weather forecast ran a few Canadian cold fronts too long. “You’re killing me, Smalls,” she said. During a commercial break, which they miraculously hit on time, Cibrowski briefed Stephanopoulos on the Today show, as he did every morning. “They had a real weird hodgepodge of stuff,” Cibrowski said. “They did [alleged Travyon Martin shooter George] Zimmerman, a long segment on a missing girl in Arizona, and now they’re doing Will and Kate. And,” he added, with a note of giddiness, while staring up at a muted monitor carrying the Today show, “no Matt!”

  It was shocking but true. Once again, as Operation Bambi slowly commenced, and GMA loomed ever larger as a threat, and Robin Roberts, despite a serious illness, flew back and forth across the country on successive days to be on the GMA set, Lauer stood firmly by his contractual right to a four-day workweek. He’d been on the show from Monday through Thursday, but was replaced this time by Carl Quintanilla, a member of CNBC’s morning lineup. Around GMA, these Lauer-less days only strengthened the assumption that Curry’s ouster was a fait accompli. “Is he on strike till she goes?” one producer asked.

  After seven thirty, Today featured a live interview with a Texas couple whose three-year-old son had had a baseball snatched out of his little hands at a Rangers game earlier in the week. Cibrowski could live with that story selection, he said, because Elliott’s taped interview with the same couple had run earlier in the hour. “We felt it was worth what it was, a minute forty-five.” On Today the story was given about three minutes, a veritable telethon by morning show standards; it ran so long, in fact, that the child seemed to be falling asleep toward the end. “He used all his energy for GMA,” ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider quipped. “Off camera, you know they’re hitting that kid with a cattle prod.” Said Cibrowski, sounding as if he were teaching a broadcasting class, “That’s why you tape it.”