The News Sorority Page 44
But her opening evening broadcast also featured a different facet of Diane—her other side, as it were. She did an inspiring story—an appropriate pre-Christmas piece—about the Brattleboro, Vermont, First Baptist Church and its pastor, Suzanne Andrews, who, along with her congregation, had decided to sell the church’s prized Tiffany windows in order to be able to accommodate more homeless people in its shelter. The museum-quality windows were less important than helping the destitute—this was the Diane Sawyer of St. Mark’s Methodist Church and St. David’s Methodist Church in Louisville, choosing to tell this story.
The next evening she told viewers that her report had caused many of them to call the church and donate money, thus at least temporarily saving the windows.
Diane called this a “miracle,” which irked media critic Andrew Tyndall, who says, “Calling something a ‘miracle’ with not a single word about how much money was raised, or how firm the promises were, and saying, as she did, that ‘when we showed you this last night, somehow we just knew this could happen’: That isn’t journalism, it’s inspirational propaganda.”
Throughout her months and then years at World News, Diane would combine the hardest-won hard news and international exclusives with service-to-the-populace features on health and living. “She’s an advocate for the audience,” Jon Banner says, adding a point similar to the one Andrew Heyward made about Katie: “The idea that we are a bunch of people sitting behind a desk telling you”—stentorian voice—“‘Good ev-en-ing’ is not who we are as a country and not who the audience wants us to be anymore.”
Sometimes Diane’s approach bordered on feel-good inspirational. Spirituality was something she was not afraid to occasionally inject into news, Tyndall says. This was heartland Diane, Methodist Diane, and over the years of her anchoring, that tinge of spirituality would become “the ABC News ‘house style,’” and not exclusively a female province: Diane’s star correspondent and “heir presumptive,” David Muir, would report on the occasional “miracle” right along with her. (For example, in August 2013, Muir reported that multiple witnesses in rural Missouri saw a priestlike man come to the aid of a young girl trapped in a car after a crash. Photographs did not reveal any such man, making his “miracle” status all the stronger, Muir implied. The mystery man was credited by the girl’s parents and others with helping to calm and save her.)
When Diane came on board during the holiday season of 2009–2010, she had her hands full—and then she made them fuller. Barely back from Copenhagen after her Ahmadinejad interview, she went off to Afghanistan in early January. As Jon Banner, who accompanied her, recalls, “We were there for four days” at the start of the “surge.” “She got amazing access to General [Stanley] McChrystal—did some off-camera intelligence briefings with him, flew around on battlefield circulation,” talked to people on the Kabul streets sans bulletproof vest.
“And we were sitting in the newsroom,” on January 10, “and we found out about the Haiti earthquake”—7.0 on the Richter scale, devastating on the impoverished country. The original death toll figures fluctuated wildly (eventually, it would be reliably estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 people were killed, with many more injured). “It was pitch black outside, there were no private planes in Kabul, but Diane would not take no for an answer,” Banner says. She finally found a plane from Kabul to Frankfurt, and another from Frankfurt to New York. She and Banner and a few others then got a JetBlue flight from New York to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and there boarded a small prop jet. “There were six of us and we got all the way to the Haitian runway but were turned back”—the airport was closed. Back in Santo Domingo Diane beseechingly convinced the pilot of a small helicopter—“the tiniest little chopper I have ever seen,” Banner says—to crunch her and the medical editor, Richard Besser, “who’s about six foot six,” into its miniscule hold and fly them to Haiti.
Diane’s zeal had a competitive aspect: Katie, with the advantage of having flown directly from New York, had beaten her to it, becoming the first major network anchor on the ground in Port-au-Prince. Katie garnered powerful interviews, stirring with initial-report immediacy. As Katie would later recall, “When we landed on the tarmac, the first person I saw was a woman in a wheelchair whose head was completely bandaged in bloody rags. She was one of the lucky ones. . . . I asked her companion where she had been when the earthquake struck. ‘She worked at the Citibank building,’ he told me,” referring to one of the more well-built structures in the country. “‘It’s been flattened.’ . . . Haiti’s President René Préval was also on the tarmac. He wasn’t wounded, but he seemed lost and wondered aloud when help would arrive.” Katie was driven through the streets of Port-au-Prince. “It’s so hackneyed to say it looked like a disaster film, but when that’s your only frame of reference, it’s difficult to come up with adjectives other than ‘surreal.’ A building completely intact stood next to one that had pancaked. People were working with tiny pickaxes in a slow, painstaking way to dig through the rubble. Some walked through the streets on a kind of mass exodus to nowhere. It was strangely silent. No ambulances, fire trucks, or rescue workers. As I quickly learned, these services don’t exist in Haiti.” Notably, Katie—effectively—employs the opposite perspective from authoritative, crisis-zone-saturated Christiane: Katie exaggerates her American Mom naivete (“when that’s your only frame of reference,” “as I quickly learned”), her abashed provincialism, and her eagerness to learn, coming eye level with her armchair viewer.
The race between Katie and Diane in Haiti was on.
Diane and Richard Besser were eventually joined by the others, including Jon Banner and Robin Roberts. The hotels were destroyed. They set up camp at the airport. “We slept on baggage carts out in the open the first night and in a building that could have been toppled by aftershocks, sitting upright in chairs,” Banner continues. “It was as unglamorous as it could be.” If Katie had the advantage of seeing the destruction first, Diane had the advantage of immediately experiencing conditions as close to those matching the residents’ as any major anchor could be forced into. Diane interviewed with no place to change or shower. She didn’t worry about herself, Banner says, but she was “very concerned” for the Haitians. “‘Where was the aid? Where were the ready-to-eat meals? The tents? The water purifiers and water supplies?’ We did a Primetime special that night and she took the lead in anchoring.”
All this—Copenhagen, Afghanistan, Haiti—within her first three weeks as World News anchor.
• • •
BUT IF THE FIRST MONTH OF 2010 felt like a triumph for women in TV news—two out of three anchors, female—there was a hidden downside. The rising tide did not lift all boats. The TV news economy, internationally, was in trouble. On February 1, 2010, CBS News instituted “massive layoffs, worldwide,” says a then foreign bureau principal. One New York staffer estimates the number as “about a hundred” employees in a wide variety of capacities, including technical. Of this number, eight female producers were let go, and “four of the women, all over the age of fifty, worked directly for Katie’s broadcast,” whether out of London, New York, or Los Angeles. One was fired and the other three dismissals were termed “voluntary retirement” and came with monetary compensation, but one of those three women insists “it was not ‘voluntary’—we wanted to keep working. And not one of us got a note or a phone call from Katie. Great big feminist—she lets them fire eight women while she compares herself to Hillary Clinton,” this woman says, bitterly. “That’s ‘convenient’ feminism.”
As it happened, the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar hit the newsstands the very next day after the eight female producers were dismissed, and in it was a breezy interview with Katie, illustrated by a movie-star-glamorous photo of her in a chic, one-shoulder-strapped beige sheath. Now, fashion magazines do that sort of thing all the time, and network publicity departments like them to do it, and anyway, the photo completely failed to capture Kati
e’s essence. But to the CBS News staff reeling from the layoffs, the accident of timing was bad, as was the magazine’s Web-embedded promotional video of, as one high-level female staffer recalls it, “Katie dancing around like she was twenty and saying she has ‘the best legs.’” It is hard to overestimate the pain that many CBS senior staffers—including women—felt at the cuts in the reporting budget while the elephant in the room—Katie’s phenomenal salary—remained. Irrational though it might have been, it felt like Katie was rubbing in her privilege while so many women saw themselves, or their friends, clearing their desks and saying good-bye.
By the same token, and the same accident of timing, the movie Up in the Air—about an executive, played by George Clooney, who flies around the country firing people—had just been released. Says the laid-off staffer, “Katie thought it would be ‘fun’ if the Evening News did a piece about it. None of the senior producers had the balls to explain to her why that was inappropriate, but they did call the assigned correspondent to tell him he had to include the premise of the film in the first graph of his piece because they did not want Katie to have to say the words ‘fired’ or ‘laid-off.’ The piece ended up not airing—but because news got in the way, not because Katie realized how insensitive it would be.” A female senior staffer says the widespread feeling was: “Les has to have his head examined!” Even when CBS had known bad fiscal days were coming, “they hired her for fifteen million!”
• • •
WHILE DIANE WAS fine-tuning her show during its first year, she explained the stories in practical terms, and her injection of a citizen-eye-level service component came to be its leitmotif. Executive producer Jon Banner would call her practice of having correspondents sit at her desk and converse with her “experiential broadcasting; she was an advocate for the viewer.” When the BP oil spill happened in April 2010, “she was really driving our coverage and was reminding our audience—on a daily basis, with passion—how much oil was spilled” and how that spillage was affecting the fishermen and the community. Once, while home visiting her mother in Louisville, she encountered a neighbor who stepped off a curb and broke her femur; she came back and talked to the medical editor—and ended up doing an investigative segment on a drug that was supposed to increase bone strength but, under certain circumstances, when taken by older women, actually made bones more brittle.
TV cognoscenti would marvel that, by 2010, onetime Morning Katie had become all business while formerly restrained Diane was now acting like your neighbor and leading with her heart. As Andrew Heyward says, “If you’d arrived here from Mars and were told, ‘Here’s a quiz: One is a regal news superstar and the other is the girl next door. Here are the evening news scripts. Match them,’ you would fail.”
In mid-October, when thirty-three Chilean miners were rescued alive after sixty-nine days trapped underground—the longest successful rescue operation ever—Diane devoted exceptional airtime and passion to the story of the valor of the miners and the rescue team. As the daughter of a historic mining community, she felt an emotional tug. Still, even beyond that, a lesson—that people’s character matters—seemed to inspire her to dwell on the story, according to Andrew Tyndall, who drew a far-reaching conclusion about her worldview, even her politics. “No evening newscast dedicated more time and resources to the event than ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer,” Tyndall wrote in his newsletter, and the “human nature” rather than “public policy” angle was behind the appeal of the story for her.
Tyndall continued:
Her enthusiasm for the Chilean story—and the lessons she learned from it—vindicates this analysis. It is a commonplace . . . to refer to Fox News as the conservative network. Yet Fox is as committed as any liberal to the concept that . . . governments and institutions are both the causes and the potential solutions of society’s problems [while a] conservative is skeptical that the human condition is susceptible to social engineering. Sawyer is the true conservative. For her the world is personal, not programmatic, inspirational, not partisan.
Diane was not politically conservative—her politics were intriguingly vague (“My husband has said he doesn’t know my politics,” Diane recently said)—but Tyndall had caught something in her character that went all the way back to childhood and that validated her mother’s values.
Meanwhile, over this whole second six months of Diane’s anchorship, and unbeknownst to her, a potentially power-upending development was in the works behind the scenes. In Los Angeles, “Ben Sherwood quietly approached” Anne Sweeney, the president of ABC, says a friend of Sherwood’s, and suggested himself as someone who could help Sweeney find a replacement for David Westin. Westin was being eased out of his news division presidency, people in the know believe, even though this wasn’t officially acknowledged. (“His relationship with Diane had cooled dramatically,” says a senior staffer, positing this as one possible reason for the easing out.) “Ben’s a very good student; he learned from the best—Diane,” this friend says. Another insider describes what happened: Brian Grazer, the producer with whom Ben’s wife, Karen Kehela, worked, called top Disney ABC boss Bob Iger “and got Ben into the process as a consultant” to Sweeney for the purpose of discreetly finding a new president. Producer David Doss’s name had been bandied about. But Doss was known to have an explosive temper. “And then Ben did a Dick Cheney,” the insider says, referring to how George W. Bush’s vice president self-chose himself when he’d first been tasked with heading up the search team. The Sherwood friend uses the identical coinage: “He Dick Cheney’d himself in”—he suggested himself for the job. “And I would imagine that one of the selling points with Anne was that Ben had a long history with Diane but now wasn’t beholden to Diane.” Things had changed since his involuntary leaving of GMA years earlier. The friend puts it bluntly: “With Ben, I don’t think he gives a rat’s ass” about what Diane wanted or wants. “I don’t think he cares.”
Ben Sherwood had been Diane’s intern, then her staffer, then her executive producer. She had been responsible for his dismissal. Now he was her boss.
In December 2010, exactly a year after she came on as anchor of ABC World News, Ben Sherwood replaced David Westin as president of ABC News. The insider felt then and feels now, “Ben’s gonna stick it to her. She will pay dearly. She might have met her match in Ben.”
One week after this revelation, Diane received equally startling news but of a far more personal and tragic nature: Richard Holbrooke suddenly died. Holbrooke—by now the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—had taken ill at a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and had been rushed to the hospital with a tear in his aorta. Twenty-four hours of surgery could not heal the wound. “He was such a pivotal part of her growth and formation,” says one who worked with her. “He wasn’t just a boyfriend” before Mike. “He was for years her primary counsel. She’d relied on him.
“David Westin had a series of [farewell] dinners with the anchors and Diane didn’t go. I’m told she was completely devastated” by Holbrooke’s death. In her subsequent memoir Paris: A Love Story, Holbrooke’s widow, Kati Marton, wrote of how, at Holbrooke’s memorial service at the Kennedy Center, “I noticed a tall, blond woman, alone and hunched inside her black coat—Diane Sawyer, Richard’s partner for many years before I came into his life. She had written me the briefest and most generous note. ‘At the core of Richard Holbrooke,’ Diane wrote, ‘was his deep love for you.’ I walked over to say thank you. Tears were streaming down her face and we exchanged a wordless embrace.” Diane had been charming and tactful with that note, some people thought—for, they believed, she had been the great love of his life.
• • •
CHRISTIANE MADE A major move—to New York City—in 2008. Sure, she had lived there back in the late eighties when she was doing weekend reporting on the Coney Island hot dog–eating contests and rooming with Liza McGuirk, but now she was coming back as pr
obably the most well-known and well-regarded foreign correspondent in the world.
Her tenure started out auspiciously. She and Jamie were swept into an influential social circle—she was a hero; powerful people wanted to be her friend. The pair became close friends with D.C. social maven Sally Quinn and her husband, legendary Washington Post eminence Ben Bradlee, and with ABC president Robert Iger and his wife, newscaster Willow Bay. While a producer with whom Christiane would soon work believes she continued to want to go out into the field as a reporter—“I think she missed the traveling but was excited about trying something new”—another whose path she would cross believes, “She wanted the anchor’s life now. She didn’t want to spend her entire adult life in shit holes. She wanted to be home with her family and go to parties at Bob Iger’s house.”
Indeed, a CNN person who was in on discussions between Christiane and the top executives at the network, and in discussions among the executives themselves, characterized her and their goals this way: “Christiane had put in her time as a frontline correspondent. She had been extremely courageous—physically courageous. And now, having done that for twenty years, she deservedly felt it was time to morph into the next phase of her career. To [us at CNN] that meant doing documentaries, which we had had her start to do.” This person is referring, of course, to the God’s Warriors series, as well as the important documentary she was determinedly preparing for the network on a subject deeply important to her reporter’s heart: genocide. (The documentary aired in December 2008, timed to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations convention to prevent genocide and punish its perpetrators.) “She’s primarily a reporter in the field,” this person continues. “But in her mind that meant sort of retiring into a position as a grand dame interviewer.” Grand dame interviewer? It is a bit startling that Christiane’s desire to be an interviewer was described, by people within her home network, with such aspersion. Sure, she had a certain hauteur. But her abidingly serious work would seem to render even low-key snark unfair.