Word: co-anchor
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Uptight is hardly a word to apply to Zucker these days. Try upbeat. After three years of soap-opera travails and ratings woes, NBC's morning show has almost miraculously righted itself. Katie Couric, who became co-anchor a year ago, has managed to make people forget the short, unhappy tenure of Deborah Norville. Bryant Gumbel, the show's sometimes testy on-air leader for the past decade, is smiling more. And the audience is filing back into the auditorium. Though Good Morning America retains a narrow lead in the ratings, Today scored a weekly win last month...
...producing job on Today. His arrival coincided almost precisely with the start of the morning show's much publicized problems. First was the infamous Gumbel memo, in which the anchor made disparaging remarks about some of his colleagues, notably weatherman Willard Scott. Then came the departure of longtime co-anchor Jane Pauley and her replacement by Norville, the brittle blond who alienated both viewers and staff members. Today slipped from No. 1 to second in the ratings; morale sank just as fast. "This place went through hell," says Zucker. "We can acknowledge it now because it's over...
...over largely because of Couric. Formerly the show's national correspondent, she filled in as co-anchor when Norville went on maternity leave in February 1991 and was given the job permanently a month later. Couric's unaffected, girl-next-door likability has helped calm down TV's most volatile family circle. Zucker takes care to parcel out praise evenly, defending the often abrasive Gumbel. "Bryant is very opinionated," he says. "That's his greatest strength, and it hurts him too. But you'd be hard- pressed to find a better interviewer on TV." Still, he admits, "Katie has reinvigorated...
...week, depriving all candidates of the chance to promote issue-oriented messages. Said former Democratic Party chairman John White: "Your first instinct is to think there's an opening, but other candidates were really disadvantaged by this trash too. It just sucked up all the oxygen in the room." Co-anchor Cathy Burnham of the state's leading television outlet, WMUR, wryly acknowledged that fact last week as she introduced a story on Senator Bob Kerrey's health-care ideas. "And now," she said, minutes into the newscast's political coverage, "let's try to get to the issues...
Nina Totenberg, the respected legal-affairs correspondent for National Public Radio, was co-anchor for PBS coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Clarence Thomas. Her commentary, though a bit preachy, sounded authoritative. Totenberg had a more than normal interest in the outcome. Several committee members were demanding an inquiry into the leak that had provided Totenberg and New York Newsday's Timothy Phelps with the scoop that Anita Hill had accused Thomas of sexual harassment, which led to the hearings she was covering. Moreover, Totenberg said one reason she took the charges against Thomas seriously was that...