Piers in Vogue

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Your Views on the News, October 9, 2010

A few readers sent us the link to an article that ran in New York Magazine entitled Chasing Fox, written by Gabriel Sherman. Sherman writes about, among other things, how Klein came up with the Parker/Spitzer team, Aaron Brown, Crossfire and the long rumored CNN/CBS merge. Here are a few of the opening paragraphs. It's a really interesting read and we hope you'll find time to read the entire article by following the link.

In the spring of 2006, a year and a half after he was hired to run CNN/U.S., Jonathan Klein went to his boss Jim Walton with an idea. CNN was in trouble. While the network remained a profit engine and an iconic brand, prime-time ratings were stalled. Fox News had surged ahead in the cable-news race, and now, alarmingly, Keith Olbermann was coming on strong. His anti-Bush broadsides were transforming his 8 p.m. MSNBC show, Countdown, into a bombastic counterweight to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, and combined, both personalities were drowning out CNN’s Paula Zahn, the respected television veteran who was anchoring a standard newscast during the 8 p.m. slot.

And so Klein set out to poach Olbermann. At the time, Olbermann had a window to negotiate in his MSNBC contract and Klein made a hard sell. He told Olbermann he could bring Countdown to CNN—the two even discussed which members of Olbermann’s staff would make the move with him. “Jon and I were in very deep discussions on a regular basis for me to go over there,” says Olbermann. “One of the premises was we would have put MSNBC out of business.”

Ted Turner’s vision of the primacy of the news remained something of a religion at CNN. But Klein was hired to take risks. A former executive vice-president at CBS News, Klein had a reputation as an expletive-spouting showman. He was based at CNN’s offices in the Time Warner Center, lunched frequently at Gabriel’s and Porter House New York, and enjoyed reading his quotes in the Times. When he took the job in 2004, he insisted CNN give him the title of president. It was a style that didn’t always sit well with Walton and senior executives in Atlanta, which had been the power center that imbued the network with a folksy, cautious sensibility. A CNN lifer who had joined the network as a 23-year-old video journalist, Walton cast himself as a protector of CNN tradition.

Walton pushed back on Klein’s plan to hire Olbermann. “I’m not gonna be the guy who’s gonna turn CNN into an opinion network,” he told executives in meetings. But in Klein’s view, CNN already was an opinion network. For an hour each night, Walton tolerated Lou Dobbs’s anti-immigration tirades. Klein pressed Walton to reconsider, but Walton held firm. “I bailed out when it became apparent that the people above [Klein] were less than sanguine about this,” Olbermann tells me.

There has been plenty of movement since then at CNN: Campbell Brown came and went; Lou Dobbs was finally forced out; Larry King at long last retired. But ratings have mostly flowed in one direction: downward—down 40 percent since 2009.

Klein faced a possibly insoluble cable-news riddle: How do you build the kind of excitement that draws in viewers without being partisan? At a Time Warner board meeting this spring, Walton was forced to defend CNN’s ratings issues. The pressure on Klein ratcheted up. In April, Klein began talks with British talk-show personality Piers Morgan. In June, he announced that he would hire the famously black-socked and disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer. Klein faced stiff internal resistance to hiring Spitzer. When one CNN executive expressed to Klein the concern that viewers risked being turned off by Spitzer’s hooker scandal, Klein had snapped, “I don’t give a fuck.”

Pairing him with a female co-host was delicate. “They were concerned a young, beautiful co-host wouldn’t work,” said one source familiar with the show’s development. Finally, they settled on Kathleen Parker, an attractive 59-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning conservative columnist. The Parker Spitzer show debuts on October 4.

Klein thought his place at the network was secure. Six weeks ago, CNN signed him to a new contract. But late last month, Walton made his move. Klein was planning to head to a rehearsal for the Parker Spitzer show when he stopped by Walton’s office. In a five-minute conversation, Walton told Klein he was out. “You’re the best president CNN has ever had, but we’re making a change,” he told him. In Klein’s place, Walton was bringing in longtime CNN executive Ken Jautz, a former CNN Berlin bureau chief who had successfully juiced the ratings of sister network HLN by taking it down-market and tabloid. For now, Jautz is staying the course. “Our business model is based on quality journalism and nonpartisan programming,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong; we have a ratings challenge in prime time.”

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Ex CNN'ers On GMA This Morning

Rick Sanchez spoke with George Stephanopoulos Friday morning on ABC's Good Morning America about Jon Stewart and what comes next for the fired CNN anchor.

Also on the program was Lou Dobbs defending himself against charges that he has hired illegal immigrants.






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Lose the Parker in Parker/Spitzer?

For those of you who just can't get enough Parker/Spitzer news this was posted on dailyfinance.com yesterday. It was written by Jeff Bercovici

JEFF BERCOVICI

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/cfyoBu

To say Parker Spitzer, CNN's new prime-time show starring former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and conservative writer Kathleen Parker, failed to win over critics from the start understates the matter. Go here or here for a survey of the reviews, which mostly focus on the forced chemistry between the two hosts and the jarring lack of flow between segments.

Of course, the critical response would be irrelevant if the show were attracting viewers, but at least on its first night, it didn't.

CNN, of course, says it's happy with the show and confident in its prospects, but there's reason to think the network is already quietly lining up the fire trucks next to the runway in expectation of a flameout. The major reason is the dismissal, two weeks ago, of network President Jonathan Klein who developed Parker Spitzer and also recruited British TV interviewer Piers Morgan to succeed Larry King.

Another Swing and Another Miss

I noted that the timing of Klein's ouster, coming before his newest shows had a chance to prove themselves, was curious, but CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton had an explanation: "We felt it was important to go ahead and make the move before we launched the new programs because we felt it was important not to have any disruption once the programs were on the air nor any seeming of dissatisfaction with the programs."

Maybe. Or maybe, once Parker Spitzer went from concept to execution and Walton got his first look at the result in the days leading up to the launch, it became glaringly obvious that Klein had swung and missed yet again and it was past time to give someone else a shot. After all, the two hosts were chosen and announced without so much as a screen test being performed.

That's just a guess. Here's another one: It will be weeks, not months, before Klein's replacement, Ken Jautz, makes a significant change to Parker Spitzer's format. Several critics have said the dual-host thing is awkward and that Spitzer, the bigger name of the two, might fare better with a show of his own. (MSNBC's Morning Joe, which seems to be the loose model for Parker Spitzer, is built around a similar dyad, but it's clearly Joe Scarborough's show.) Don't be surprised if that's the direction Jautz takes it.










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Soledad O'Brien Injured in Horse Riding Accident

From BVBuzz.com...

 

Award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien is on the mend after a fall from a horse that caused serious injury to her knee.

On Sunday, the 44-year-old CNN anchor was horseback riding in Brewster, N.Y., with her daughters, Sofia and Cecilia, when she was thrown from her horse.

"She got spooked by another horse and ditched me," she told BV Buzz. "I tore absolutely everything in my knee. My surgeon said 'impressive!' I am on crutches now and doing physical therapy. I'll have surgery in two weeks when the swelling goes down."

Timing couldn't be worse for the Emmy-winning media talent, who is gearing up for a whirlwind promotional tour. O'Brien has a new documentary called 'Almighty Dept' that premieres on Oct. 21, and her book, 'The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities,' comes out on Nov. 2.

"It's super hard to clunk around on crutches! You know what's annoying is now I'm slow and I usually get 10 things done at one time! So cutting back is really hard for me," she shared, before adding: "Plus, the kids keep baking me get-well-soon cakes, which I'm eating!"

The married mother of four, who was born María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien, said her doctor has cleared her to swim and get on her bike to maintain her fitness regimen.

As of now, she doesn't intend to cancel any travel plans and will be in Atlanta this week presenting Morehouse College's Soledad O'Brien Freedom's Voice Award to actor Hill Harper and music mogul Kevin Liles.

"I'm trying to figure out how to walk in crutches in a gown," she laughed.

Though best known for her compelling reporting on documentaries, such as 'Black in America,' 'Black in America 2,' 'Latino In America' and 'Rescued,' O'Brien was also part of the coverage teams that earned CNN a George Foster Peabody Award for its Hurricane Katrina coverage and an Alfred I. duPont Award for coverage of the Asian tsunami.

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Ratings For The Week of September 27th

1 - Special programming was aired on two nights.


Rating calculations are weekly averages based on nightly ratings provided by TVNewser with data by Nielsen Media Research. Numbers reflect Live and same day (DVR) data.

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Some Sanchez Follow-Up

We would be remiss if we didn't point out some of the follow-ups to the firing of Rick Sanchez.
First is David Letterman's Top Ten from Monday night:

Jon Stewart had a little to say on the subject:



And finally,former CNN senior producer Chez Pazienza worked with Sanchez at CNN and has know him for more than 20 years. Here's a bit of his take on the newsman:

As a local anchor, he was brilliant -- really, the best I've ever seen. That's because he understood that television on the whole was largely bullshit and that local news -- particularly the kind done so well at WSVN in Miami -- was just a lot of superficial dazzle. He figured if you could talk and talk well, what you were saying wouldn't really matter. He deserves credit for what one producer we used to work with together jokingly called his unique ability to "demystify television."

To read more of I, Sanchez check out Chez's blog Deus Ex Malcontent.

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