As liberals inside and outside CBS News panic over how new Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss is going to “ruin” it to the center, Variety reported last Thursday that Gayle King is “expected” to exit her co-hosting job at CBS Mornings when her contract expires next May. CBS denied that quickly.
But we have long noted that King is a radioactively glowing symbol of liberal bias, donating many thousands to Democrats before she signed up in 2012, and outraging insiders in 2017 by vacationing on a yacht with the Obamas.
New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor noted King and her longtime best pal of Oprah Winfrey, partied after midnight with the Obamas in the White House after Barack’s inauguration celebration for “their family and closest friends” in 2009. She’s also close friends with liberal Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).
So aside from the appearance of moving away from that image, dumping King would make a lot of sense: She’s 70, she costs way too much (Puck’s Dylan Byers suggests it’s $10 million a year), and most importantly, CBS has long been mired in third place in the morning race. So why not change it and make it cheaper? The media reporters just like to say that it’s awkward for these stories to tumble into the press.
The celebrity newsers at TMZ caught King for an impromptu interview on the street on Friday, and she said “I have no idea” about being dumped or re-purposed, insisting she hasn’t heard anything to suggest she’s on the way out.
“All I can say is this, from what I’m being told inside this building … all I’ve been told by everybody in this building is that they want me here, they like the job I’m doing, I like the job I’m doing,” King said.
“I like the job and the people that I work with, so I don’t know what to tell you,” King continued. “What I’m hearing in the building is not what I’m reading in the press. And what I’m not going to do is negotiate it in the media. Not doing that!”
Changes in the morning would follow changes on the Evening News, with co-anchor John Dickerson walking away from that flailing third-place show. It wouldn’t be surprising to see King join the rotation of interviewers at 60 Minutes, as former evening anchor Norah O’Donnell has done.
The other card in this deck is morning co-host Tony Dokoupil, who recently outraged the leftists by challenging radical black author Ta-Nehisi Coates on his flagrant anti-Israel bias. The “move it to the center” lobby could move him to anchoring in the evening or make him the morning lead.
