Will someone please buy gags for Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford?
It makes no difference what the color is.
Plain or polka-dotted.
Painted or sequined.
Scented silk, Egyptian cotton, or an auto mechanic's oil-soaked rag. Just as long as it can be stuffed into their mouths.
When their mouths are open, the personality-drenched hosts of NBC's fourth hour of "Today" are swilling cocktails, blathering about themselves, or interrupting their guests.
It makes no difference who the guest is. Cookbook or romance author. Relationships or nutrition expert. A-list actors. No one gets more than a couple of seconds without cross-talk with one or both of the hosts. They may think it's funny. Or, maybe, like authors who are sometimes paid by word, or doctors who are given bonuses for scheduling myriad lab tests, these babblers have to justify their seven-figure annual incomes by the jabber rate of words per minute. It may be time for NBC to move all four hours of the "Today" show from the news division into the entertainment division.
Almost as bad as the GabFest at 10 a.m. is what has happened to news shows. At one time, news anchors, assisted by newswriters and producers, went into the field, got the news, wrote it, edited it, and then broadcast it. They sat in anchor chairs because they were excellent journalists. But broadcast journalism--and those two words should seldom be put next to each other in the same sentence--with a few network and regional exemptions devolved into yet another mess of Reality TV.
The co-hosts, known as anchors, are usually a tandem of a wise middle-aged older man and his pretend trophy wife, both of whom spend more time in Make-up and Hair Dressing than they ever spent in journalism classes. Their reporters and correspondents may have studied journalism in college, but their interests were undoubtedly more focused upon voice quality, delivery, and personality than source building, probing, and fact checking.
On air, the anchors open with something serious. A fire. A mugging. A supermarket opening, reported by freshly-scrubbed 20-ish field reporters and recorded by videographers with digital cameras and almost no knowledge of what video is. In all fairness, it's hard to know what videotape is when your best friend is an iPad.
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