WASHINGTON – Larry King, an institution at CNN for a quarter-century, is standing down as a nightly host in the wake of plummeting ratings.
The one-time radio host, who has interviewed presidents, monarchs and celebrities using an average-guy-from-Brooklyn approach, said he is stepping down for personal reasons. But as King lost nearly half his audience over the past year, he increasingly seemed a relic of an earlier era.
“I’m glad it happened on my terms,” King said in an interview. “I have mixed emotions . . . It’s been a helluva run . . . You always feel bad when there’s a ratings decline. I never felt any pressure. CNN never pressured me.”
The announcement that King will end his programme this autumn comes as his seventh wife, Shawn Southwick, is recovering from a drug overdose.
The couple had announced they were splitting up but now are attempting to reconcile.
He said his family troubles were not a factor in his decision.
CNN has been under enormous pressure to boost its prime-time ratings, and speculation has run rampant that King might step down next year and be replaced at 9pm by personalities ranging from Katie Couric to British journalist Piers Morgan.
King said he will still be part of the CNN family by hosting occasional specials. He boasted he had made the Guinness Book of World Recordsfor the longest-running show with the same host in the same time slot. But he was being hammered in the ratings by Fox News's Sean Hannity, and increasingly by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
In the first quarter this year, King’s audience declined to 771,000 viewers, from 1.34 million a year earlier.
With his unadorned style – basically sitting in front of a microphone – and non-confrontational approach, King rose to international fame, sitting down with every president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama.
His show was largely seen as one for celebrities until the 1992 presidential campaign, when his interviews with the candidates made television talk shows a new kind of platform for politicians.
King has conducted 40,000 interviews at CNN and even more in a half-century of broadcasting, with such luminaries as Tony Blair, Marlon Brando, Jackie Gleason, Mikhail Gorbachev, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey and Malcolm X.
He said he had just concluded a call with his staff and is worried about finding them jobs.
“It was sad,” he said.