Reaction to the end of ‘Larry King Live’: almost entirely gracious

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Nancy Reagan called, and Regis Philbin, and Diane Sawyer, and Anderson Cooper via video, all to check in with Larry King on Tuesday after he announced that he’d be leaving his 25-year-old CNN show come fall.

‘Nothing is forever, but there’s new things ahead,’ King told Reagan.

‘Well good, as long as it’s better, that’s fine,’ she replied.

Ministry readers responding to our nonscientific online poll were, at the time of this post’s publication, also tilting in favor of ‘Yes, I’ll miss ‘Larry King Live’ when it’s gone.’ (You can vote at the end of this post.)

King’s cable competitors from MSNBC chimed in as well: Rachel Maddow with well wishes, and Keith Olbermann with some tweets that were, surprisingly, all about Keith Olbermann.

After alerting his followers that King would be stepping down, the ‘Countdown’ kid explained who he was talking about — ‘Larry King is a lovely, generous man who tried, for eight years, to convince his bosses to hire me to be his 8 p.m. lead-in at CNN’ — and then trifled with a world-record reference from Larry’s ‘I’m outta here’ statement:

‘Oh, crap. This means mine will be the longest running prime-time cable news show not on Fox. Crap, crap, crap,’ Olbermann said.

Hmm. Based on what our associate Joe Flint notes in his Morning Fix — listing Piers Morgan, Katie Couric and Ryan Seacrest as buzz names to succeed King — maybe Olby’s just a little on edge these days.

The Fox folks were quiet, though after a straightforward announcement of the news, Andy Levy from the late-night comedy-news mashup ‘Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld’ worked out some material: ‘This should be interesting: Larry King’s suspenders just announced they are not stepping down. Wow.’

Bill Maher appeared on King’s show Tuesday, incidentally, and nosed around the idea that leaving might have been CNN’s idea more than the host’s. King said no, and added, ‘It was time, Bill. It was time.’

For a reminder of the difference between leaving and getting pushed, check out King’s interview with Jerry Seinfeld, above.

— Christie D’Zurilla

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