Why Larry King Mattered
The Brooklyn-born broadcaster and journalist was a bridge between talk radio, 24-hour cable, and internet news.
Photo credit: Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock.com
When Lawrence Harvey Zeiger was born in Brooklyn on November 19, 1933, national media hardly existed. Cities and towns had their own newspapers, fed by stringers, foreign bureaus, and global news agencies known as “wire services” because they delivered fully written stories over telephone and telegraph wires. Commercial radio broadcasting was only a decade old, and it came over wires too, fed into broadcast towers that had limited range. Television technology existed, but television networks wouldn’t evolve out of the radio broadcasting corporations until after World War II.
The internet was 60 years from becoming a mass technology.
At his death on Saturday, January 23, 2020, Zeiger—known to you as Larry King—had mastered every medium there was, blending politics with entertainment and pioneering a genre of audience-engaged, celebrity-infused soft news that now dominates the political media sphere.
Born into an Orthodox Jewish family that immigrated from Belarus, Larry grew up poor, supporting his mother and brother after his father died in 1942. But he loved radio and made it his goal to become a broadcaster. On May 1, 1957, King graduated from broom-pusher to broadcaster, going on air at WAHR in Miami Beach when a radio personality quit abruptly. Soon he was doing a morning music show, two afternoon newscasts, and a sports show every day for $50 a week.
Right before Larry went on air that first time, the story goes, the station manager told him that “Zeiger was too difficult for people to remember.” So he picked a new surname, one he saw in an ad in a Miami newspaper advertising King’s Discount Liquor Store.
But that is a story: I am skeptical that it is factual. It wasn't—isn’t—uncommon for ambitious immigrants with ethnic surnames, particularly ones going into showbusiness, to want to sound a little more American. By 1959, the broadcaster had legally become Larry King, and throughout the 1960s, he worked his way up at WIOD-Miami. King’s first big regional hit was a live talk radio show broadcast from a Miami delicatessen. In a peculiar mix of the talk genre and television shows like Candid Camera, King would interview anyone who walked in the door, whether it was a waiter or crooner Bobby Darin. By 1964, mentored by Jackie Gleason, King’s television show, launched in 1960 on WPST-TV, also took off. In 1966, he was also hired to do color commentary for the Miami Dolphins. In the 1970s, King used that platform to launch a new radio talk show called (wait for it): Sports-a-la-King.
But it was satellites that made King a national name, first on radio and then on TV. In 1977, the Mutual Broadcasting Service, founded as an independent radio network in 1934 but now owned by multi-level marketing company Amway, switched its transmission from telephone wires to communications satellites. This made it possible to transmit a show nationally, and inexpensively, in real-time, an essential step for the talk show genre. The Larry King Show was born on January 30, 1978, complementing a boom in talk radio driven by music stations migrating to the more high-fidelity FM sounds. Abandoned AM channels became all-news and all-talk stations, a nursery for shock jocks and other personalities who would re-invigorate radio as a place to do politics and create community.
Larry King worked all the time, for his whole life. Perhaps this, as much as anything else, meant that he liked being married, but didn’t stay married to any wife very long: seven women could lay claim to the title “Mrs. King”— one of them twice.
It must have also been hard to live with someone who stayed up all night. Broadcasting from midnight to 5:30 a.m., EST, in his trademark shirtsleeves, necktie, and suspenders, Larry King’s fare wasn’t for a general audience. It was for insomniacs, oddballs, and—perhaps most importantly—the working people who kept the nation going all night long, people who never saw prime time entertainment because they had already punched into work.
Best of all, they were invited to take part. King would always have an interview, and then open his show to listeners at 3:00 a.m., inviting them to phone in and discuss anything they wanted with him. Frequent callers would get nicknames and become unpaid characters on the show. "The Numbers Guy," "The Portland Laugher," "The Miami Derelict," and "The Scandal Scooper," much like anonymous Twitter personalities today, created an ongoing narrative and commentary as they bantered with King.
In 1985, Atlanta advertising mogul Ted Turner, who had also jumped on communications satellite technology to start a new network, CNN, hired King to bring his audience to cable TV. According to Turner biographer Porter Bibb, at $1 million a year, King was CNN’s highest-paid employee. He was certainly making more than he had made on radio. But King made perhaps a quarter of what other news anchors did, reflecting the precarious finances of this first all-news channel, as well as the still low prestige of cable—and the talk genre—in the news ecosystem.
Larry King Live, as the show was now called, would set the table for cable media figures to come, with its personality-driven broadcast-style and liberal interpretation of what “news” was. In the next decade, “Larry King was a key player in replacing television reporting, especially on cable, with `talk,’” historian and journalist David Greenberg, author of Republic of Spin (Norton 2017), told me in an email. One of those figures was conservative Rush Limbaugh, who acquired his own national radio show at WABC New York in 1988. Limbaugh often used conversations that had occurred on King’s show the night before as topics for his own audience to chew over, but he also quietly adopted King’s innovations, giving his listeners names, and inviting regular call-ins from particularly radiogenic fans.
But Greenberg thinks that the broadcaster is underrecognized for his role in bringing a radio style to a cable news industry that struggled to both differentiate itself from highbrow Public Broadcasting System shows staffed with pundits and compete with tight, fast-paced, broadcast news magazines that required multi-million dollar budgets. “We pay more attention to the right-wing “talkers” from radio who transitioned to TV such as Hannity, O’Reilly, and Limbaugh (briefly),” Greenberg points out. “King was a radio guy who took his act to CNN fairly early in the history of the rise of cable news. “
And that act was, in many ways, a version of the conversations that King grew up around hanging out on Brooklyn stoops, long into the night, with car radios playing news or a baseball game, and everyone within earshot getting to have an opinion. “He was a schmoozer,” Greenberg told me, “and had the gift of gab. There was a lot to dislike: some of us got tired of hearing him prattle on a lot sooner than he got tired of himself. And, understandably, a lot of people found him to be excessively `soft’ in his questioning.”
But Greenberg also sees loss in a show like King’s giving way to the more ideological approach to political talk news that took over cable after 1995, as MSNBC and Fox News began to turn politics into partisan entertainment. The beauty of Larry King Live was King’s “absence of ideological intensity, the lack of a political ax to grind. That, Greenberg points out, “was what made his show a safe space for public figures of all sort to come and speak in a relaxed fashion, and that gave his show value.” Audiences also never knew who would call in: celebrities, politicians, or ordinary citizens wanting to challenge a guest’s assertions were equal to ordinary listeners like them.
King also had the occasional scoop. When he invited Texas billionaire Ross Perot, Jr. onto the show to discuss President George H.W. Bush’s economic policies in 1992, King asked about rumors that Perot might jump into the presidential race as an independent. Perot replied that “he wasn’t suited for it,” but as King recalled later, “something in me didn’t believe him.”
So King asked again. And again.
This time [Perot] looked at me and said, “If I can get on the ballot in all 50 states, I’ll do it.” We made history that night. His campaign began on cable television. So, though Perot lost the election, he changed politics. Here’s this little man, who–let’s face it–didn’t have a typical presidential look, but he was able to speak to people directly. He brought an informality to TV politics, whether touting his economic plans via infomercial or coming on my show as a private citizen, after the election, to debate Vice President Al Gore about NAFTA. The audience had never been more informed.
For every thrilling moment of live TV, there were hours of far more mundane conversation, and that eventually eroded his audience. “Eventually,” Greenberg notes, King “was overtaken by shows with a sharper edge, and that was unfortunate. We underestimate the importance of broadcast interviewers—Charlie Rose was another—who don’t seek to turn everything into a political argument.”
In 2011, King’s show was displaced by a similar show hosted by English journalist Piers Morgan. King hated Morgan’s show and thought the network squandered what he had built. From King’s perspective, the viewer experience was “like watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in your new Bentley,” Morgan recalled in a bitter Tweet.
King left CNN in 2012 and started his own broadcasting company, Ora TV, relaunching his show as Larry King Now and creating a second called PoliticKING. The shows took full advantage of the post-cable television environment, broadcasting on the Ora TV web platform, on Hulu, and on RT, a Russian network linked to Donald Trump.
He remained a larger than life figure who refused to age out. “I once went to a birthday party for Larry King,” journalist and media historian Eric Alterman, the author of Lying in State (Basic Books, 2020), told me in an email. “He recreated Coney Island. All of Washington came up to suck up to him. Alan Dershowitz in particular. It was a living nightmare.” But Alterman thought that King hung around too long: he “was not a bad guy, but he should have quit before going on RT. That was just sad.”
But because King never really retired, his life literally spanned every modern media form, from the early days of radio to the 21st-century internet. In his final years, it is perhaps not surprising that King became a fan of Twitter, dictating tweets to an assistant who would send them out with the hashtag #itsmy2cents to 2.4 million followers. “I Twitter every day,” he told a journalist at The Washington Post, ungrammatically but endearingly, in 2015.
There’s no biography of Larry King yet. But, when there is, embedded in the story of his life will be the story of the American broadcast industry, one that engages Americans through talk—and talking back.
Claire Bond Potter is Professor of Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research, and co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020).
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Why Larry King Mattered
Thank you! He is a really interesting person -- I think it is fascinating that there is no biography.
Awesome piece!