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Steve Donohue

Paris Interview Disappoints

I love Larry King. At least I used to. Almost as much as I loved Larry King Jr., that New York Observer writer who parodied King’s wacky USA Today column.

As Fox News chief Roger Ailes told us years ago, King is an original. “You could take 50 guys better looking than Larry off the street, let them not do any homework, and put them out there in a pair of suspenders and they’d fail,” Ailes said.

King seemed to have done more homework than he usually does for his much-hyped interview last night with Paris Hilton. But he failed to ask her tough questions, or even reasonable questions, such as, “What do you do for a living, anyway?”

When Katie Couric interviewed King on CNN recently to mark his 50^th year in broadcasting, he said one of the reasons he doesn’t prepare for interviews is because he wants to be able to see the interview subject through the eyes of a viewer – the regular guy or gal at home. But King left thousands of his fans wanting much more Wednesday night.

At CNN, the bigger problem is its decreasing focus on hard news. Network anchors are adding too much opinion to stories (some viewers now immediately change channels any time Lou Dobbs begins to whine about immigration or Anderson Cooper gets on his soapbox to talk about New Orleans).

That wasn’t the way it was going to be at CNN, new president Jon Klein said after taking over. “Sizzle is out. Audiences expect substance and we deliver that in a way no one else does … we are feeling very good about the momentum we have gained and the fact that we are showcasing our reporting. Our gimmick is news,” Klein told The New York Times last June.