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

Stelter, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1455512877 ISBN 13: 9781455512874

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2013

Synopsis

Discover the cutthroat world behind the polite smiles and perky demeanors of morning news in the book that inspired the Apple TV series starring Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, and Steve Carrell.

When America wakes up with personable and charming hosts like Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos, it's hard to imagine their show bookers having to guard a guest's hotel room all night to prevent rival shows from poaching. But that is just a glimpse of the intense reality revealed in this gripping look into the most competitive time slot in television.

Featuring exclusive content about all the major players of the 2000s, the book illuminates what it takes to win the AM -- when every single viewer counts, tons of jobs are on the line, and hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. Author Brian Stelter is behind the scenes as Ann Curry replaces Meredith Vieira on the Today show, only to be fired a year later in a fiasco that made national headlines. He's backstage as Good Morning America launches an attack to dethrone Today and end the longest consecutive winning streak in morning television history. And he's there as Roberts is diagnosed with a crippling disease -- on what should be the happiest day of her career.

So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and discover the dark side of the sun.

PRAISE FOR TOP OF THE MORNING
"Mr. Stelter pulls back the curtains and exposes a savage corporate world that might have been inhabited by the Sopranos." - Washington Times

"A troubling look inside an enterprise as vicious and internecine as a soap opera." - Kirkus Reviews

About this title

About the Author

Brian Stelter is the chief media correspondent for CNN and anchor of the show Reliable Sources. He was previously a staff writer at the New York Times and was featured as a subject in the New York Times documentary Page One. Before joining the Times in 2007, he was the founder and editor of TVNewser, the pre-eminent blog about the television news industry, which was sold to MediaBistro in 2004.

From Booklist

Near the end of this fight-to-the-death story of Good Morning America versus the Today Show, Stelter writes, “relatively few people knew who the warring executives were.” And that’s part of the problem with this book. Although Stelter, a media reporter at the New York Times, makes a heroic effort to identify the suits, it’s still fairly easy to mix up the players, whose machinations make up a big part of the story. More familiar, of course, are the stars of the broadcasts: Matt Lauer, Ann Curry, Robin Roberts, et al. The focus here is on the decision (dubbed Operation Bambi) to get Curry out of the chair next to Lauer, who felt no chemistry with her. At the same time, Today, which had been number one in the ratings for more than 800 weeks, was beginning to hear the footsteps of second-place GMA closing the gap. After Today dumped—excuse me, promoted—Curry and Robin Roberts fell ill with a blood disease, the battle became more pitched. Stelter injects himself into the narrative, which aims for a breezy tone (“some crazy shit is going down”). With more than 350 interviews under his belt (though no Lauer or Curry), he does have insider props. In the end, however, while this account does have its fascinating moments, they would have easily fit into a long magazine article. Give this to fans of Bill Carter’s The Late Shift (1994) and The War for Late Night (2010) about a similar battle for nighttime ratings supremacy. --Ilene Cooper

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1455512877
• ISBN 13: 9781455512874
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320