‘Today’ is too much: making the ‘AM’ switch
I’ve officially switched morning news shows. Against my better judgment, I’ve been watching The Today Show for far too long, and with the recent announcement that Kathy Lee Gifford would be joining the show in the fourth hour, I realized I had to make the jump. Granted, I never get as far as the fourth hour, but out of principle I suppose, I had to acknowledge that the show had officially jumped the shark.
The show has been bad for as long as I’ve watched, and I admit that I continued to watch mainly to see just how low it could go (and now I know). A painful discontinuity arises between fluff pieces (how to make a low-cal margarita, who got bumped off last night’s Idol?) which segue into misguided attempts at hard news (death toll in Iraq, the genocide du jour). The whole thing leaves me uncomfortable and confused – the real news seems less sobering when sandwiched between sugar-free cocktails and the latest Britney news – and why am I making margaritas at 7 a.m., anyway? And while I enjoy a bit of celebrity gossip as much as the next person, I like to take it for what it is: gossip. But Today has that habit of trotting out some quack psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist or some other “-ist” for an armchair analysis – somehow making the segment less “gossip” and more “news” (but I’m not buying it).
So this week, I made my decision. I must find a new, less nauseating morning news show to go with my coffee. But once the decision was made, the tough question was where to go next? I can’t take Good Morning America seriously since I saw that zero-gravity clip on The Daily Show. I still don’t hate myself quite enough to turn to Fox and Friends. And I have no idea what the deal is with The Early Show.
But, ah, then I found it – CNN’s American Morning. No cocktail recipes, no celebrities, not even any gimmicky, self-deprecating segments to garner ratings. John Roberts achieves that balance of Serious News Anchor, but he’s relaxed enough for a morning show (I mean, I can only handle so much before my first cup of coffee). Likewise, Kiran Chetry is cute (though comfortably short of “perky”), but I can still take her seriously when she’s telling me about the sub-prime mortgage crisis or the latest Congressional hearings. With American Morning, I can actually get a sense of what’s going on the world, but without feeling totally overwhelmed before I even make it to work.
Plus, Sanjay Gupta is totally dreamy.
Elizabeth “Liz” Gartley, of Houlton, has a BA in media studies from Emerson College in Boston. She has studied abroad in the Netherlands and Australia, and most recently interned at a production company in Hollywood. She can be reached online at egartley@gmail.com.
