Battle for the Morning

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Today, Good Morning America and Morning fight to be first

Plug in the percolator, scramble the eggs and pour the milk over the granola. These paragraphs must be read in the proper atmosphere, with all the sights, sounds and smells of an American breakfast: toasters popping, bacon sizzling, people bustling to get to work or school on time.

For this is the story of an institution as revered as breakfast, as certain as the sunrise. Since 1952, when the Today show first burbled at an unsuspecting world, millions of Americans have depended on early-morning television for news, weather, helpful household hints—and perhaps an excuse to avoid talking to spouses or children at that delicate hour.

In the past several months the early shows have scooped their evening news cousins on several occasions. Billy Carter chose to talk first about his Libyan connections at that hour, and Gerald Ford electrified last July's Republican Convention with the announcement that, yes, he might be interested in becoming Vice President again. Many people in Washington consider it a duty to turn on the TV before they turn off the electric blanket, just so they will not miss a similar thunderbolt. Some day, indeed, anthropologists doubtless will wonder how people ever woke up in 1951—and in all the millenniums before that.

Now something new is going on in those sleepy hours from 7 to 9: the Battle of the Morning, TV's fiercest competition of the day or night. The battle pits three of television's most engaging personalities against one another:

David Hartman, ABC'S Mr. Aw Shucks, an ex-TV actor (Lucas Tanner) with the gentle smile and careworn countenance of a kindly uncle.

Tom Brokaw, NBC's Mr. Clean, an experienced journalist with the snub nose and boyish good looks of the class president, the boy most likely to succeed.

Charles Kuralt, CBS'S middle-aged Huckleberry Finn, a rumpled newcomer to this three-way race, having added the week day Morning to his imaginative, much acclaimed Sunday show only in October.

Up and down the battle goes. After five years of trying, ABC's Good Morning America finally broke the 27-year domination of NBC's Today show early this year. For 33 weeks straight, from Jan. 14 through Aug. 29, ABC was either tops or even with NBC in the Nielsen ratings. Then NBC gradually inched ahead, helped by Shogun and the World Series: viewers tend to leave the dial where it was when they went to bed the night before. During the past two months the lead has bounced back and forth. The most recent count gives ABC a 5.9 rating, NBC 5.1. Since each ratings point is equivalent to 778,000 households, that translates into 4,590,000 sets tuned to Good Morning America, 3,968,000 to Today.