Inside Today: The Battle for the Morning

Students of television history will want to read this account of the agonies and ecstasies of NBC's morning show from 1978 to the present, written by the program's talent coordinator from 1980 to 1984. At the start of Kessler's tenure, Today competed for viewers with ABC-TV's Good Morning America , a ratings battle that intensified when CBS-TV entered the sunrise fray with its Morning News. Kessler is not vindictive toward any of the individuals involved; she is perhaps overly generous to those she especially esteems, such as Tom Brokaw, but restrains herself when discussing those she does not (she never actually calls Bryant Gumbel a male chauvinist, although she suggests that he is). And on occasion she is given to hype, as when she writes of Today 's ``near-tragic era'' and describes the 30th-anniversary program in 1982 as ``a poignant moment in history.'' (Oct.)