As my colleague Brian Stelter reported last month, Mr. King’s audience has been cut in half since the presidential election, to an average of just 725,000 viewers a night, a number that ranked him far behind Sean Hannity on Fox News, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and even at times behind the relatively new “Joy Behar Show” on HLN, CNN’s sister network.

Mr. King’s contract is up a year from now, and while CNN had no specific comment on succession, a spokeswoman did remind us that Mr. King is still a force, regardless of what the ratings say:

“The world has never seen a better or more influential talk show host than Larry King,” said Christa Robinson, the spokeswoman. “While the media regurgitates speculation about his coveted role, Larry is busy organizing a telethon on Monday night to raise money to help clean up the gulf the way he raised nearly $10 million for Haiti earthquake relief a few months ago. That kind of influence and impact is exceedingly rare.”

It’s nice that the network is supportive of a talent that helped build its identity, but is this really how CNN wants this all to play out? It’s not as if the idea that Mr. King’s reign might end came out of nowhere. He has always been a bit of a cartoon, but a willing one, and he made for good television as he wobbled his way toward greater truths using a regular-guy approach to inordinately famous or newsworthy people. Not any more.

On Thursday night, he took on BP’s Congressional testimony with four highly politicized commentators and failed to tame the lions. Each segment ended in unwatchable cross-talk. Earlier in the week, he stepped up on the gulf story by interviewing Sammy Kershaw, a country singer and candidate for lieutenant governor of Louisiana, but seemed powerless as Mr. Kershaw kidnapped the show by reading a windy infomercial about the glories of gulf seafood from notes scribbled on a piece of paper.

In the same week, his show tacked to the tabloid side of the news, with interviews of the family of the slain Peruvian woman, a death for which Joran van der Sloot has been charged. Mr. Van der Sloot is a suspect in the earlier, much followed disappearance of the Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba.