To the main question of newsmen doing game shows, I've said before that the skills required to be a newscaster and the skills required to be a game show host are very similar. That's why you can look at so many successful game show hosts who came out of that world, where you have to project the best version of yourself you can, but relatively few who came out of the world of acting, where you're pretending to be someone you're not.
I don't know Pat Kiernan, and I never got to see Studio 7, but you guys seem to be impressed, and he's just the latest in a line of *recent* hosts to have a firm journalistic background. Meredith Vierra and Anderson Cooper immediately come to mind, and anyone unfortunate enough to have seen the pilot to the $64,000 Question remake saw that Greg Gumbel was by far the best thing about it.
One of the few good things about the continuing blurring between news and entertainment is that we might see more of these talented journalists willing to do game shows. Newsmen used to cross the line all the time (most successfully represented by John Daly and Hugh Downs) and it's nice to see that start to happen again.
