Ok, this might be moved to general discussion or media, but I know that Gregory has been the subject of many threads lately about how vile he has been in this general election season. This provided me with some morning giggles. I like the suggestion about Gregory taking over Brit Hume's place on Fox news! And I agree that he is vanilla, but he does have an "opinion voice", he just disguises it as an anchor voice, like many corporate whores.
http://www.observer.com/2008/media/david-gregory-nbc-s-lame-duck?page=0%2C0David Gregory: NBC's Lame-Duck?
On the morning of Sunday, July 20, NBC News paterfamilias Tom Brokaw was wrapping up Meet the Press, where he has been anchor since the sudden and untimely death of Tim Russert.The weekly round table had ended, and it was time to say goodbye to his guests, NBC political director Chuck Todd and NBC White House correspondent David Gregory.
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Mr. Gregory kept smiling as the credits rolled. But if deep inside his mind there was a momentarily flicker of career anxiety, the ambitious newsman could be forgiven. Since Russert’s death, speculation about the future anchor of Meet the Press has tended to favor the 36-year-old Mr. Todd and Mr. Gregory, 37. And it was Mr. Todd who got the public invitation to return. Of course, it’s not Mr. Brokaw’s decision. But the slip was a reminder that nobody in Washington seems to be paying attention to Mr. Gregory’s new show.
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“He was that guy for the Bush administration,” said Mark Leibovich, a Washington-based reporter at The New York Times. “In a sense, he was the perfect Bush foil. Everything you hear about how George Bush felt alienated at Andover and Yale, and how he felt aggressively anti-elitist towards the people he thought were full of themselves, well, David Gregory would certainly fit that mold.” But lame-duck presidents create lame-duck White House correspondents. And so identifying the silver-haired heartthrob with the big political story of the day was a blessing from the network. From the moment the show kicked off on March 17, things looked grim. The format was essentially a high-tech version of, say, The McLaughlin Group, with various journalists sitting around debating topics of Mr. Gregory’s choosing. There was one innovation: Instead of sitting around a table, the heads of the various guests appeared in boxes. An unfavorable review of the show in The New Republic promptly described the look as “intergalactic Nancy Grace.”
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Halfway through his stint at the 6 p.m. hour on MSNBC, Mr. Gregory’s numbers are solid but not remarkable. For the second quarter of 2008 (from late March to late June), Race for the White House averaged roughly 526,000 total viewers and 161,000 in the 25-54 demographic—roughly twice the audience that Tucker Carlson averaged during the second quarter of 2007. Twice Tucker is a form of damnation by faint praise. And numbers for Race for the White House have been relatively flat from month to month, suggesting that Mr. Gregory has already attracted the audience that will recognize and follow his name. Now it’s a question of what his show can do. And while his colleagues at MSNBC have been stirring up controversy and grabbing attention from viewers inside the Beltway at every turn, Mr. Gregory has yet to make much noise.
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If you think he has real talent—and boy he does, he’s a good ad-libber, he’s good on his feet—you would think that NBC would think twice about building that brand before they mix news with opinion,” said The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta. “On the other hand, if he does not develop an opinion voice, is he vanilla as an anchor on MSNBC?”
At the same time, the show has also done little to define Mr. Gregory’s anchoring style. Should the network posit Mr. Gregory as a big thinker or as an entertaining character? For the time being, they have done neither.
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If Mr. Gregory is to have a shot at Meet the Press, he’s going to have a rough autumn.
Then again, if Meet the Press doesn’t come calling, there may be other options around the corner. In January, anchor chairs could well open at other networks—Katie Couric’s seat at CBS, for instance, or Brit Hume’s at Fox News. And then, once Barack Obama is inaugurated, Mr. Gregory could return to where he came from, live to fight another day.
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