Breakfast television
type of morning television show
Breakfast television (Europe and Australia) or morning show (Canada and the United States) is a type of news or infotainment television programme that broadcasts live in the morning (typically scheduled between 5:00 and 10:00 a.m., or if it is a local programme, as early as 4:00 a.m.). Often presented by a small team of hosts, these programmes are typically marketed towards the combined demography of people getting ready for work and school and stay-at-home adults and parents.
The first – and longest-running – national breakfast/morning show on television is Today, which set the tone for the genre and premiered on 14 January 1952 on NBC in the United States. For the next 70 years, Today was the number one morning program in the ratings for the vast majority of its run and since its start, many other television stations and television networks around the world have followed NBC's lead, copying that program's successful format.
Format and style
"I like to think viewers never knew what was round the corner," says Owen. "One minute it would be a laugh a minute with Eric Morecambe ... the next minute it would be a top government official."
Breakfast television/morning show programs are geared toward popular and demographic appeal. The first half of a morning program is typically targeted at work commuters with a focus on hard news and feature segments; often featuring updates on major stories that occurred overnight or during the previous day, political news and interviews, reports on business and sport-related headlines, weather forecasts (either on a national or regional basis), and traffic reports (generally common with locally produced morning shows on terrestrial television stations serving more densely populated cities, though this has begun to filter down to smaller markets as intelligent transportation system networks have spread further into smaller communities).
Combining serious news and informal segments is breakfast television's appeal to viewers. Later in the program, segments will typically begin to target a dominantly female demographic with a focus on "infotainment", such as human-interest, lifestyle and entertainment stories.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Breakfast television” as type of morning television show. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1472288. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Breakfast television” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.