Al Roker explains why he’s been away from ‘Today’: blood clots in his leg and lungs from pneumonia, and an allergy attack that left him exhausted. It’s his first day back since the election and he does this exclusive CBS News interview from his home in New York. (Partial transcript below.)
You’re a big ‘Today’ show host since 1980. Are you looking forward to being back with the show?
You know, I’m not going to have to do any interviews or do a sit-down interview with myself. There were a few people I wanted to talk to but they can wait. I’m going to have a nice time. I’m hoping that there’ll be less stuff on television news. It’s been going on for so long and we haven’t done a lot of them lately. Everybody’s interested in this so much that I don’t know why they’re not. I wish they would be more interested in the news than we are.
This has now become one of the most expensive news events of the decade. The media coverage is enormous and we’re not getting an ounce of it. We have three people who are very, very close to the president: the president of The United States, his sister, and Steve Bannon, and then there is Trump with his very close family and no one really tells you about them. And the television news doesn’t have enough time to ask about them. And we don’t have a whole lot of time to talk about those people. We have to wait for the other stuff to come out, which is the other Trump.
At the peak of the coverage you started to see stories about President Trump’s family and how the White House wasn’t talking. What happened?
The media is being controlled by the Clinton campaign and that’s why there is so much negative coverage about the White House. They did a very, very good job of controlling all the coverage. They created this media bubble and they had been controlling this all along. They are controlling it right now in the