There will be a new face waiting to greet viewers at “CBS This Morning.”
Nate Burleson, the former NFL wide receiver and current CBS Sports football analyst, is joining the program, according to three people familiar with the matter. These people said Burleson is seen as a potential successor to some of the current anchors at the show, and they suggest it’s possible that the move will break up the current group of co-anchors, Gayle King, Anthony Mason and Tony Dokoupil. King has been with “CBS This Morning” since 2012 and has stood at the center of the show since it was revamped following the departure of Charlie Rose, has a contract that ends next year. Mason is a veteran CBS News correspondent who has filled many roles, including as interim anchor of “CBS Evening News.”
CBS News declined to make executives available for comment. Executives at the ViacomCBS unit are expected to announce the move formally Wednesday morning.
The addition of Burleson would take the sober-minded morning program further from its roots. As originally conceived, “CBS This Morning” is supposed to provide a hard-news alternative to its main rivals, ABC’s “Good Morning America” and NBC’s “Today,” which rely as heavily on summer concerts, cooking segments and social-media round-ups as they do on giving viewers a morning update on all breaking news of import. “CBS This Morning” is expected in the fall to move to a new studio in Times Square that once housed MTV’s “TRL” and can be seen from the windows of the New York set that houses “GMA” just a few blocks away.
Aficionados of the show may already be familiar with Burleson. He helped fill in while co-anchor Tony Dokoupil was on paternity leave, part of a test that had celebrities and others who do not hail from traditional journalism hanging out during the program’s 8 p.m. hour.
Shawna Thomas, who joined “CBS This Morning” as executive producer in January, told Variety in an interview in May that “CBS This Morning” wasn’t getting soft. “We have longer, more in-depth pieces” than others, she said. “I am unwilling to sacrifice that kind of storytelling,” because “it is still our differentiator. This isn’t a knock on cooking segments by any means. They have their place. It’s just not necessarily us.”
More to come….
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