I remember telling one of my producers, John Gabriel, the news that my CNBC show had been canceled and replaced by a rerun of Hardball with Chris Matthews in June 1998. He was stunned as he stared at me, making sure I wasn’t joking, and never took his eyes off me as he reached behind him to feel for the sofa he sank into.
I don’t remember any explanation. I told the staff, and everyone was in a state of shock. I immediately took my things and left the building. Later, someone from NBC told me, “You didn’t have to leave right away,” but, of course, I felt like… well…
It was shocking, because as was later reported we had been the highest-rated show on CNBC at ten p.m., eleven p.m., and one a.m., often beating CNN. Our program was also the only CNBC talk show to receive a nomination every year for a Cable Ace Award for Best Talk Show.
A couple of weeks later, New York Newsday’s columnist Marvin Kitman wrote about the incident, and even more than ten years later, his kind words have stuck with me:
“Charles Grodin, my favorite late night talk show since it debuted January 9, 1995, was abruptly taken from us two weeks ago. After 624 programs the show was sacked by ‘Mutual Agreement’ or whatever CNBC wants to call what happened the night of June 5th.…
The actor/director/author went where no talk show has gone lately. Not only could he make you laugh, but he could make you think. It was an original concept to give an open mike to somebody who could not only speak his mind, but had a mind he could call his own.
His monologues were fascinating because they were so rare.… He talked about injustice, welfare, the homeless, the poor. He was using TV to discuss issues. Using it as an educational tool… To be fair, as Grodin himself said, CNBC was the only place that allowed him to come on and talk about some of these things, and then ‘they only took me off for economic reasons.’
He was one of the things that was good about TV, a genuine original, the closest thing we had to an Oscar Levant.”
Marvin thought the reason for my cancellation was an interview I did with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the previous November about his book The Riverkeepers, which referenced CNBC’s parent company, General Electric, polluting the Hudson River. “It was the longest attack on a General Electric–owned network on GE for polluting the Hudson River,” Kitman wrote. “Not only had GE dumped PCBs, Kennedy explained, but it was now doing everything in its power not to clean it up. Why? The cost. ‘If it was $20,000,’ Kennedy said, ‘it would have been done 20 years ago. Now they estimate a billion.’ But that was nothing like Kennedy’s claim that ‘Every woman between Oswego and Albany had elevated levels of PCBs in her milk because of GE.’ I’m sure that must have thrilled them up there in Fairfield, Conn.”
After the cancellation of my show, there was such an immediate, overwhelming outpouring of protests from the viewers that within about a week they called and asked me to come back to host a Friday night show at seven p.m. on MSNBC. Within a year and a half that came to an end as well. By that time I was ready to go, because five years of hosting a show, even if the last year and a half it was once a week, felt like enough.
I should have seen the writing on the wall, because before we were canceled we were moved from ten p.m. to eleven p.m. and replaced by, of all things, reruns of Conan O’Brien, which followed Rivera Live, a programming concept that boggled a lot of minds. It was definitely an effort to ease me out. I no longer believe what I said at the time, that it was done for “economic reasons.”
One executive at CNBC, Bruno Cohen, whom I liked, told me a sponsor had asked, “Is he going to keep doing those monologues?” Bruno told him, “That’s the best part of the broadcast,” so I probably offended more people than I can imagine.
Since soon after I left MSNBC I was hired to be a commentator on 60 Minutes II, I never thought much about what Marvin Kitman had said. But in recent years I’ve run into two of my former friends from GE/NBC/CNBC at events. One looks at me like I stabbed him in the back. The other looks at me like he was on my side. I’ve since offered both these people to raise money for one of their charities, but my call wasn’t returned, confirming in my mind that what Marvin said in fact was true.
Marvin Kitman summed up his column with the following:
“Chuck, you did a super job for the last few years. You asked the basic question in your commentaries and interviews: What is going on here? You did it on national TV. It’s a credit to GE that it let you do it and a discredit to stop you in mid-sentence, metaphorically. This is a crazy time in history. We need people to sort it out. Some of us may not have liked your approach, but you were doing what TV public affairs should be doing, explaining the insanity of these times to us.”
I now agree with Marvin Kitman that the corporation saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, appearance as not in their interest, so they tried to stop free speech, but of course free speech is more important than any corporation, and it’s not as though Mr. Kennedy’s appearance had any impact whatsoever on the strength of GE. Free speech is one of the things that distinguishes America from so many countries, and any corporation that tries to stop it shames itself.