Citizen NewsNG 
Larry King, the Brooklyn-bred man who became cable TV’s most well-known talk-show host, died Saturday. He was 87.
He was best known for hosting “Larry King Live” on CNN from 1985 to 2010
King had been hospitalized with COVID-19. He passed away Saturday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Ora Media, a production company King founded with Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim.
“For 63 years and across the platforms of radio, television and digital media, Larry’s many thousands of interviews, awards, and global acclaim stand as a testament to his unique and lasting talent as a broadcaster,” the company said.
Over the course of more than five decades years in radio and TV broadcasting, half of it spent hosting CNN’s “Larry King Live,” King mingled with the famous and infamous, and average people who became either.
By his count, he interviewed well over 60,000 subjects, and when his run on cable ended in 2010, he segued to the Internet with “Larry King Now,” a daily talk show on Hulu from Ora TV, and became an active presence on Twitter.
He vowed never to retire and to keep interviewing until he died. But King was not immune to other illness: 30 years after undergoing quintuple heart bypass surgery, which prompted him to quit a lifelong three-pack-a-day cigarette habit and lose weight, a 2017 checkup revealed a cancerous lung tumor that was removed with surgery.
He revealed he had a stroke in March 2019, was in a coma for weeks and considered suicide. “I thought I was going to bite the bullet; I didn’t want to live this way,” he told an interviewer at Los Angeles station KTLA. In April of that year, he had an angioplasty after complaining of chest pains. But once again, he recovered and kept working.
Near the end of 2020, King landed in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with COVID-19. Hospital protocols prevented his family from visiting him. He was moved to the ICU on New Year’s Eve and was receiving oxygen but moved out of the ICU in early January and was breathing on his own, said David Theall, a spokesman for Ora Media, said at the time.
The author of several books, King started his career in Miami radio before moving on to TV and newspapers. His nightly CNN program, which premiered in 1985, remained the network’s top-rated show throughout his tenure, which ended in 2010.
While some traditional journalists tended to dismiss him as a celebrity interviewer who didn’t ask tough questions, the truth was a good deal more complex.
“King was one of the few people in broadcast history who basically created his own phenomenon,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. “He didn’t need a network. The network needed him.”
King’s interview subjects were a virtual Who’s Who. They ranged from the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and thousands of others, including Paul McCartney, Bette Davis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Madonna and Malcolm X.
His children Andy and Chaia die within weeks of each other.
