The phrase "morning-show newsperson" might be seen as a contradiction in terms, since so many hosts of morning-news broadcasts have been actors. But Gayle King, the co-host of "CBS This Morning," is the real deal.
Cynics may suggest that her rise to fame is primarily the result of her close friendship with Oprah Winfrey, who made her a correspondent for her eponymously titled talk show, and of course Winfrey, having been an actress as well as a talk-show host and producer, is not taken seriously for being a Jill of all trades despite her stupendous success. But Gayle King made it to the top on her own.
She had worked her way through TV-news, beginning in the seventies as a production assistant at WJZ-TV in Baltimore, (where she met Winfrey, then an anchor at that station) to training as a reporter at WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C. She later served as a weekend anchor and general-assignment reporter at WDAF-TV in Kansas City, Missouri and then as a news anchor for WFSB-TV in Hartford, Connecticut.
A lot of folks may forget that Ms. King tried a couple of daytime talk shows, including one on Winfrey's cable channel, but they went nowhere. Despite some modest success as a Sirius XM talk radio host, it wasn't until she joined CBS's morning program that her star began to rise.
Since then, Gayle King has proven her mettle as a TV journalist, handling a difficult interview with R. Kelly about the sexual-harassment charges against him and later dealing with a controversy when she brought up similar charges against Kobe Bryant, while interviewing basketball player Lisa Leslie (an earlier honoree on this blog), after Bryant's death in a helicopter accident in January 2020. Despite fierce criticism of Ms. King, CBS stood by her, because her inquiry had been taken out of context, admitting that the Bryant comment did not reflect the "thoughtful, wide-ranging interview" that Ms. King had conducted.
You can expect Gayle King to prove herself many times over going forward.
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