Good Morning America host departs with VERY mysterious note from bosses
In a memo sent to staff Monday, ABC News boss Almin Karamehmedovic said Morgan 'has decided to begin a new journey,' without elaborating.
Hours earlier, it was revealed that Morgan's GMA3 cohost, Eva Pilgrim, was leaving the show as well, taking over anchor duties for Inside Edition.
Morgan had been noticeably absent from GMA3 in recent weeks, with his last appearance on June 13.
Karamehmedovic did not specify a destination for Morgan and instead talked up his achievements.
'Earlier in his career, DeMarco worked as a correspondent and anchor at network news and various local stations in Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York before joining ABC News in 2022 based in Los Angeles,' a section of the memo read.
'He took on the role of co-anchor of GMA3 just over two years ago where throughout his reporting, his mission of telling stories of perseverance and giving back stood out.'
Karamehmedovic concluded by thanking Morgan 'for his kindness and many contributions' to the network.
'His devotion to journalism and sharing with others is evident in everything he touches.'
A source told the Daily Mail that the move is part of an 'evolution of the show' that has been in the works for weeks, rather than a 'shakeup.'
The source said hosts from various Good Morning America teams have stepped in to guest host for weeks, after a wave of layoffs in March that left GMA3 'gutted,' Status reported at the time.
An insider close to the network told the Daily Mail in April that heavy hitters Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos and Michael Strahan had all turned down offers to host GMA3, holding out for more money.
The trio also feared the program had become 'toxic' following the highly publicized affair of former co-hosts TJ Holmes and Amy Robach.
'After TJ and Amy, it's a toxic hour they want no part of,' the source said.
'They are going to want a lot more money to do any extra work,' the insider added, citing layoffs and other staffers being told to do more with less.
A rep at the time said ABC was in the process of 'unifying all day parts under the GMA umbrella and team, and that includes seeing all members of the extended GMA family in the third hour,' including Stephanopoulos, Roberts, and Strahan.
In recent months, Morgan and Pilgrim have been joined by co-hosts like Will Reever, Ginger Zee, Rhiannon Ally, and Gio Benitez.
Morgan and Pilgrim were officially tapped as replacements for disgraced co-hosts Holmes and Robach in May 2023, after the Daily Mail revealed their scandalous affair that ultimately got them fired.
A former CBS affiliate reporter, Morgan had yet to host an episode from the show's new digs in Downtown Manhattan.
In March, a source told the Daily Mail GMA's third hour 'isn't going anywhere' and that 'GMA3 is here to stay.'
In April, an insider told the New York Post that 'GMA3 won't be there at the end of the summer.'
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Once when we were at uni, my friend Martin abruptly flicked a spliff at me from five metres across a room and I somehow caught it in the corner of my mouth and began smoking it in one smooth motion. Everyone immediately applauded and pronounced me king. Alas, it was not caught on camera, or I may have ended up in a different career. But we all hopefully experience one such moment in our lives. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. 'Trickshots are just so relatable,' says Badertscher, who recently spent 16 days attempting to throw an American football over her house into an unseen basketball hoop. 'Really anyone could do them at any level. People see me in the back yard and they figure, oh, I could do that in my yard!' 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'Maybe that will teach you not to fool around with a boy who knows how to fool around,' Tom taunts the stricken Captain after defeating him at the made-up sports of womble, muck and sneedball. Many trickshooters have revelled in similar triumphs as they reveal to sceptical parents that their bottle-flipping and card-tossing actually brings in a decent income. Turkish trickshooter Gamze May says she got right on her parents' nerves when she first started making trickshots during the Covid lockdowns, marooned at her family apartment in Istanbul. 'I was bouncing ping-pong balls on pans and it was making an annoying sound. My mum and dad would get angry. But it was entertainment for me.' They are fully on board now – her two hours of trickshot work a day supplement her income as a digital marketer. But their initial scepticism reminded her of the sort of disdain she experienced as a girl who always wanted to play with the boys. 'I was always running or playing football, basketball, every sport. I was playing console games. I still play console games. I would drive remote-control cars. My mum would be angry. Why are you playing with the boys?' Her answer then and now is simple: 'It makes me happy. When I'm playing sport, I feel I am out of this world. It's like meditation. I have no stress. I don't think about problems. Maybe some people don't understand me, but I don't care when I'm making trickshot videos.' There is always the odd dissenter underneath the videos: a commenter calling out the trickshooter as a fraud or a fluke. Anyone could manage this if they did this for five hours and 29 minutes. As is so often the case, the commenters miss the point. For one, the trickshooters hardly lack skill. Mike 'That'll Work' Shields recently challenged 10 people with 'ordinary jobs' to best him at a series of trickshots, and prevailed in every single contest. Badertscher played college softball. May was the captain of the women's football team Bakırköyspor until she retired in January. 'Sports people can learn these things a bit easier,' she says. 'I spend lots of time practising and then I improve.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion These are, however, 'super-strange skills', as David Hulett puts it. Over the hours of practice, you do become incrementally better at, say, tossing ping-pong balls so they play a tune on a series of carefully arranged pans, or dropping paper from a stepladder into a shredder. It was David who had the crucial insight that a small crease across the paper will attenuate the curve of the parabola on its descent, resulting in a greater probability of it sailing into the waiting shredder. Just as Dick Fosbury's flop at the 1968 Olympics changed the entire discipline of high-jumping, so a trickshooter can alter the history of their sport in a single afternoon. But the real skill is the sisyphean determination, the patience, the faith that in the end, it will happen. Because it will happen. As long as you don't give up. 'We were always super competitive,' David Hulett says. 'Dan and I wanted to win whatever we were doing.' The trickshooter knows that they can make the sheer brute force of numbers crush the momentary fluctuations of skill. I am terrible at darts. But were I to throw tens of thousands of darts in the general direction of a dartboard, eventually, tearful with rage, starving, my entire family having abandoned me, I would score 180. All I would need to do is capture that one time on camera – then discard the 89,362 takes when I didn't do it. In this way, anyone can be Lionel Messi for 15 seconds. The cameraphone has democratised sport. Still, as every child knows, the thing that takes the time is not the playing – it is the tidying up. It's a simple thing to sit there, throwing playing cards at a target. It's a total pain picking up thousands of cards. And then there are the tech fails. Once, after three or four hours, Gamze May managed to throw a card across the room so that it curled into the hairline crack between two dice. Beautiful. Only when she went to retrieve the footage, she realised her phone storage was full and the video had stopped recording. This is the bane of her life, in fact. 'My phone always has storage problems. It's still full. I always need to clear it.' But these frustrations must be offset against the regular cadence of success that trickshooting provides. 'When I'm making videos – how can I describe the situation? It's like someone is whispering in my ear: you will do this. And I believe it and then it happens. I feel amazing. I feel like a bird. I'm flying. Maybe it seems silly to some people but it is like therapy for me.' Trickshot culture has started to infiltrate other forms of performance, too. Grégoire started out his career as a professional acrobat, performing with troupes including Cirque du Soleil before a series of injuries made him question whether there was really much future in it. 'I have a herniated disc and a really bad knee. Acrobats have short careers.' So Grégoire has taken his performances to social media, which offers him more autonomy and a more reliable revenue stream. He isn't sure what to call the hybrid form he purveys here. 'I started out throwing a knife into an apple. I'm now throwing a knife into an onion that's flying in the air and landing on a knife in my mouth. I've pushed it so far, I don't even know what it is any more,' he says. But although he exhibits amazing physical prowess, he still considers his videos trickshots. 'It's a combination of skill and luck. I have to do them many times.' He sees this as a creative avenue opened up by social media; you couldn't attempt this sort of thing on stage as it would take too many tries to get right and the audience would boo. On the other hand, the minuscule attention spans of TikTok and Instagram Reels force him to be more inventive than he'd have to be on stage. 'People always want more on social media. On stage, you can build up a story. People are patient. On social media it needs to be good right away. People get bored so easily. Everyone is just scrolling, scrolling, so it really pushes me to find the most attractive, best thing immediately.' It is a double-win, algorithmically, if you can not only snare someone's attention, but then get them to watch your 15-second video again. 'I think that's my strong point,' Grégoire says. 'The tricks are sometimes so complicated, people rewatch them three or four times to understand them.' Indeed, some of the greatest trickshooters embrace the form's inherent dadaist absurdity. Videos of ping-pong golf jostle for attention with images of death and devastation in Gaza and Ukraine, and maybe offer some mordant commentary on them – just as the artists of the original Cabaret Voltaire embraced surrealism, chaos and non-meaning at the height of the annihilation of the first world war. 'You know, when I open my Instagram now, it's like crimes against humanity … trickshots … crimes against humanity … trickshots!' says Michael Rayner, 62, AKA @brokenjuggler, who makes delightfully weird trickshot videos in his Los Angeles front yard. 'I'm sort of here for all of it,' he says, arguing that what you see on short-form media is in some senses a truer reflection of reality than what you see on TV. 'America is a very violent country right now. I perform in a lot of immigrant communities and everyone is terrified of being snatched away by Ice. My videos are my own therapy but I also hope they give people some diversion in a harsh world.' 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When they announced to their father that they intended to do this full-time, far from being disappointed, he asked for a business plan. 'Once we gave him the business plan and executed on it, he's always been very supportive. 'You're making money. You're happy. This is great.'' A successful video can bring in thousands of dollars a month but it's no sure thing. The nickel video, for example, bombed so badly that the brothers removed it from TikTok. This is why it's important to re-edit videos so they also work across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – the better to hedge against algorithmic disruption – and to pursue branding deals, which they say account for 80% of their income. Their medium-term goal is to move into more lucrative longer-form YouTube content, but even now money is good enough that they can hire a warehouse and employ business managers and editors, meaning they can spend each afternoon doing what they do best: trickshooting. On a normal day they will spend five or six hours tossing a Mentos mint into a Diet Coke bottle revolving on a bicycle wheel, or rolling soccer balls across ping-pong table obstacle courses – which makes it start to seem like a respectable time investment. Can any of us really say that we spend our working lives doing something more important? Michael Rayner certainly sees it as time well spent. 'You know, I get a lot of private messages from people saying they were really sad today but then my videos did snap them out of it for a moment,' he says. 'I don't want to be grandiose but if I can bring a little bit of happiness to people suffering from mental illness, I'm happy with that.'
