Larry King: A Fraud

Posted by Joe Rivett on 07.25.2010

While David Letterman had a hilarious Top Ten List why Larry King is retiring, here is the real reason...

I'm back from my 2 week vacation in Florida and ready to take on Larry King!

Lawrence Harvey Zeiger AKA Larry King is about to call it quits. In reality, he is being replaced for poor ratings. Something tells me if he were number 1 or number 2, CNN would love to keep him. But alas he is number three in the ratings and he has to go. Good riddance! It is about time America caught on to this untalented fraud.

Before being hired by CNN, Larry was a successful coast to coast nightly talk show host. If anyone has ever listened to any of the shows, it is basically a boring talk show with guests no one has ever heard of and no competition on the radio being a nighttime slot. Time slots in radio mean a lot. If you can get ratings in the morning or the drive home that is golden. If you get listeners overnight where there is no fierce local competition, I don't consider it a major accomplishment. This is also why I don't think Rush Limbaugh (while hugely successful) can't claim to be the greatest if he is afraid to syndicate his show in the morning or drive home.

Initially, Larry's show was popular because he could get great guests. Celebrities and politicians loved going on his show. Why? Because he didn't ask his guests anything difficult. He never challenged anybody and never made his guest uncomfortable. Jay Leno has somehow made a career doing this too. I'm impressed by politicians that go on Meet the Press or Fox News Sunday. They have to answer tough questions and defend their record/statements. Even when Larry had McCain or Obama on, I couldn't even watch because I knew nothing interesting would come out of the interview.

Famously, Larry always bragged he never really prepared for the show or he never read books from the people he had on. Okay, that is fine to be lazy, but he could have at least had interns pull out interesting quotes from books or comments people have made. His show was a snoozefest and for many years he could get away with it.

He couldn't get away with it when Fox News starting putting interesting people on the air against the boring CNN personalities. Hannity and Colmes was a much better show and quickly overtook King in the ratings. I was looking at their ratings and the day they had Sarah Palin on they had four times the ratings Larry King had. Something tells me if Larry had Sarah Palin on he still wouldn't finish first. I also noticed that on that day, Rachel Maddow had higher ratings than Larry and she rarely has an interesting guest on. What makes Hannity and Maddow more successful is that they are the focal point of the show and often more interesting than any guest. They can also make a boring guest interesting whereas Larry is never the focal point and doesn't make his guests interesting.

Boring people like Larry King and Campbell Brown have hurt CNN so much that MSNBC has owned second place in the primetime battles. Keep in mind MSNBC was considered a joke ten years ago. In the last year Larry has seen his average drop from 1.3 million viewers to 767,000. It is no wonder CNN is replacing Larry with Piers Morgan – a far more interesting personality. Elliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker should also be a more entertaining and intellectual show than Campbell Brown's disaster of a show.

Larry is also an intellectual lightweight. Maddow went to Stanford and Oxford whereas Larry had trouble with high school and it shows. Being a successful broadcaster means you have to know what is going on in the world and having a brain helps.

Larry is also unpleasant to look at as he has a 'made for radio' face. Do I really want to watch a man who looks like he's going to die on TV? Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are not only more interesting but pleasant to the eye. And yes looks matter on TV it is why they have makeup and stylists on set. It is why Nixon lost to Kennedy. We don't like looking at awful looking people.

Larry needs to retire; he's old, he's made a lot of money, and quite frankly, he needs to work on his personal life. He does a great job in selling Welch's grape juice but I haven't been interested in his show since the Al Gore v. Perot debate on Free Trade. That was a long time ago.

Competition is fierce in the television world. There are hundreds of programs to watch. To stand out you must be interesting and different. Larry King might be a fine show at midnight (where his radio show was successful) but it could not compete in the 9pm primetime slot similar to Leno having a successful show until he had to compete in the primetime slot. People do not want boring fluff interviews during primetime. They want to be entertained, not put asleep.