The News Sorority Read online

  At the outset of February, Katie flew to Egypt to cover the momentous events in Tahrir Square during the heady and tumultuous days of the Arab Spring. It was dangerous for reporters. Pro-Mubarak mobs attacked Anderson Cooper—he could be heard saying he’d been “hit” through the crush of assailing bodies who were angry at American newspeople. Cooper reported: “My team were set upon by the crowd. There was no rhyme or reason to it—it was just people looking for a fight, looking to make a point, and punching us.” Later that same day, Katie’s friends watched, through the TV screen, a similar crowd engulfing Katie as she tried to report into her microphone. “We were nervous,” says Katie’s cancer charity partner Lisa Paulsen, as the hordes drowned out her words and her feed got cut off. The media site Gawker posted the video, with the caption: “Here’s ‘America’s Girl,’ Katie Couric, narrowly escaping as the mob circles her. Don’t threaten our national lady-mascot, Egypt. Just don’t.”

  Christiane was set upon, too—the crowds ran after her crew, shouting anti-American slogans and smashing the windshield of the car in which she was being driven. This was Christiane’s meat—she’d been here before, in similarly fraught situations, in the Arab world, in a way that few of her competing colleagues had been. She would pull a scoop out of this, the most defining international story of the season.

  When Ron Haviv saw Christiane in Cairo during what both battle-scarred journalists felt was a great moment of democratization, “I got that sense” that she was happy to be in the field again. “I definitely, definitely got that from her,” he says. “It was such an uplifting and positive experience. Journalists were literally jumping up and down” at what seemed, at the time, a jubilant sprouting of democracy that had a chance of succeeding.

  Mark Phillips knew that Christiane would be the one journalist to deliver an interview with the besieged longtime president who was now in the turbulent midst of being overthrown. “She had interviewed Mubarak years before,” he recalls, “and she’d walked into the room, and Mubarak, who was a flirt, had said, ‘I see you in Bosnia and I see you in Africa and Somalia and now I see you with me!’ And she kind of smiled and said, ‘Thank you,’ which helped. Never in her interviewing did she go after people in a vicious, nasty way.” So now, in frenetic Cairo, Mubarek granted her, and her alone, a sit-down. The cameras were not rolling (though still photos emerged of them talking), but the interview was exclusive nonetheless. “The reason he talked to her was because he knew, from all those years of engaging with her, that she never twisted the words,” Mark Phillips says.

  Emerging from the interview in the palace, Christiane spoke, live, on camera to Diane, who was sitting behind her anchor desk in New York—and America learned the words and sentiments of the suddenly most reviled leader in the region through the conversation between a female news anchor and a female star foreign correspondent. In a dramatic, empathetic voice, Diane announced that Christiane had gotten “into the palace encircled by chaos” and that, in order to get there, she’d had to “move through those rioting thugs in the street, threatening death to the journalists . . . an incredible journey on this breaking story.”

  “Well, it was an extraordinary experience,” Christiane picked up, strong-voiced but far less emotional, on feed from Cairo. “Obviously, he is embattled and he hasn’t been seen [by the public]. . . . He said, ‘I feel strong . . . I will die on Egyptian soil.’ He said, ‘I’m not fed up and want to retire, but if I retire now there will be chaos, and I am afraid the Muslim Brotherhood will take over.” Christiane continued: “When I asked him if he felt betrayed, he did the shrug. He didn’t answer one way or another,” but he eventually told Christiane that “President Obama didn’t understand the culture here.”

  Diane asked, “What does he think about the violence?”

  Christiane replied, “He blamed agitators. . . . He even suggested the Muslim Brotherhood was behind it.” He said, “‘I’m very unhappy with that violence. I don’t like to see Egyptians fighting Egyptians.’”

  Christiane’s Mubarak scoop—eight days before he forcibly stepped down and the Brotherhood took over the country—incited jealousy within the industry. As her friend David Bernknopf said, “The work she did in Egypt just blew everybody away. There may not be another American reporter who is as well sourced internationally.”

  “I’m a reporter at heart . . . in the field, not an anchorperson,” she admitted to Market Watch’s Jon Friedman, explaining the triumph but also articulating her dilemma. She had landed the “dream job” she’d wanted, at a major network. But its primary subject, national news, was not her wheelhouse. This—international news—was her wheelhouse. But it involved dangerous travel, away from her son.

  A week after Christiane’s Mubarak interview, a most brutal attack upon another female journalist occurred. Lara Logan was sexually and physically assaulted by multiple men, right in the open, in Tahrir Square. It was a hideous attack. “Suddenly, before I even know what’s happening, I feel hands grabbing my breasts, grabbing my crotch, grabbing me from behind,” Lara told Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes. “I think my shirt, my sweater was torn off completely. My shirt was around my neck. I felt the moment that my bra tore . . . and . . . they literally just tore my pants to shreds. I didn’t even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things, because I couldn’t even feel that. . . . The sexual assault was all I could feel . . . their hands raping me over and over and over again. . . . They were tearing my body in every direction at this point, tearing my muscles. And they were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp—they had my head in different directions.”

  For nearly half an hour Logan put up what fight she could. “I [had] no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying,” she said. But thinking about her two children at home in Washington helped her focus on staying alive.

  That attack gave Christiane serious pause. “It’s clearly an appalling thing to have happened. I think it’s every woman’s nightmare,” she said several months later, adding, with a somewhat stiff upper lip: “I am grateful that nothing like that ever happened to me, and I spent my long career covering those kinds of events and much worse.”

  Logan’s attack, as heinous as it was, did not inhibit other women journalists, who were taking the same kinds of risks reporting international stories. “I feel very badly for her, but I don’t think she’s a martyr because of it,” says one female print journalist who has been embedded in Iraq several times. “These are the risks we take. Men in our field take different risks.” To have a woman in a situation where she’s helping to determine coverage, even at this risk, is an important thing—a leap from the old days when well-meaning Av Westin refused to let female reporters go to Vietnam.

  SUFFICIENTLY UNINTIMIDATED by the message of intimidation sent by Lara Logan’s vicious rape, Christiane stayed in the Middle East and schemed to get an interview with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi. She wrangled both the Mubarak and Gaddhafi interviews in the middle of—of all things—planning a luncheon, at her Central Park West apartment, for her friend Bella Pollen.

  The clash between what Bella has described as Christiane’s “two diametrically opposed lifestyles” was rarely more evident. Christiane seemed as intent on hosting the ladies’ party (in advance of the publication of Bella’s The Summer of the Bear) as she was on getting the interviews with the two most despised dictators in the Arab world. It was a marker of her valuing of friendship. The planning had started while Christiane was in Cairo. “She was in a car, literally being shaken by rioters in Egypt,” Bella says, “and I was shouting [through the phone], ‘The luncheon doesn’t matter! We ought to forget the whole thing!’ And she said, ‘No! I’m going to be there!’”

  Then, several weeks after the Mubarak interview, Christiane was in Libya, making efforts to get to Gaddhafi, while insisting to Bella that the luncheon would go on. Bella: “I said, ‘This is ridiculous! Stay safe! No one will mind if you cancel when yo
u’ve got the scoop on Mubarak!’” But Christiane would not be daunted. She did her interview with Gaddhafi, starting her broadcast in a helicopter over Tripoli, then sitting with a virtually unbodyguarded Gaddhafi at a beachfront restaurant on Tripoli’s Mediterranean coast. She was face-to-face with the dictator, who, in his trademark brown robe and headgear, was “looking every inch the larger-than-life character he had honed,” Christiane said.

  She dove right in, asking him about the nine protestors against him who had been shot to death. “They love me! My people love me!” He laughed and scoffed. “But if you say they love you, why are they capturing Benghazi?” she shot back. When she reminded Gaddhafi that the leaders of the United States and Great Britain were asking him to step down, he laughed. She gingerly accused him of using force against his own people. “Your own airline pilots—at least two—have defected,” she pressed. He laughed again.

  When Bella arrived in New York from London, while continuing to protest about the luncheon, Christiane sent her a message: “‘I’ve found this flight that flies me to London and then Munich and then’”—Bella exaggerates—“‘the moon!’ Christiane arrived at JFK at three a.m.” on the day of the luncheon, “and by seven a.m. she was up and moving tables to seat thirty probably very nice people she’d never met before,” all the while “simultaneously talking to her network because she got this Gaddhafi exclusive.”

  • • •

  RIGHT AFTER THE PRO-DEMOCRACY RIOTS in Egypt came the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, in March. Diane flew to Japan—she was the only evening anchor to report live from the dangerous locale—and she took an inspirational approach with the coverage. With no makeup on, but her face aglow with admiration, she visited a shelter, a maternity hospital, and other sites. The Japanese called this “the storm without pity,” she said, on her March 14 broadcast. These resilient people provided a “master class in enduring crisis.” She explained that both the Shinto and Confucian faiths placed a premium on the idea of community and that a key phrase in their spiritual teachings was “to come together in one body.”

  The poetry and philosophy that she had read at the little creek near Seneca High—that “so earnest” idealism she’d once mocked in herself—had become embedded in her broadcasts. The accretion of world catastrophes she’d witnessed and reported on had made her broadcasts more, not less, humane, even at the risk of seeming sentimental.

  One of her later GMA producers thought that she’d been—and has been—hiding her true self on the air. “She fakes being less smart than she is,” this person says. “She fakes being more ‘feminine’ than she is. She fakes being more ‘Midwestern’ than she is. That JCPenney-shopping white woman who just left the farm and, ‘Oooh! Look! I’m telling you the news’? That’s not Diane Sawyer. She’s the most sophisticated, intelligent woman I know. She should be a tough broad on the air. She won’t do it.” Maybe. But she had found an alter ego or, more likely, pulled up a part of herself, that was equally genuine. She had, indeed, become America’s Aunt—America’s glamorous aunt—and she played that role in Japan when she spoke to a brand-new mother who had gone into labor just as the devastating tremors had hit, and when she marveled at the other young mothers who had patiently waited with their babies “for three hours”—her now familiar slow syllables, her admiring emphasis—without complaint. Earnestness and compassion amid tragedy: This was her theme. Many viewers loved Diane. Others thought, as a highly placed female producer at a rival network says, “She’d given up on men.” They weren’t watching her in great numbers, anyway—she had ceded that territory to Brian Williams and, later, to Scott Pelley as well. This rival female producer concludes, perhaps too sweepingly: “Diane is doing her whole news broadcast for women.”

  This view dovetailed with what Andrew Tyndall had called Diane’s “inspirational” and “spiritual” focus, an assessment essentially seconded by Paul Friedman. Friedman wrote, in the Columbia Journalism Review, that “ABC emphasizes stories it considers most relevant to its viewers’ lives, plus lighter news and features, in a program built around the dramatic (some say melodramatic) delivery of Diane Sawyer.” That’s one way to look at it. Another is that Diane, in this story and others, was using a crisis—here, the tsunami—to illustrate the civility that people can muster in the face of difficulty, and thus showcasing the message she had lived herself and that she had exhorted to her despondent friend after his relative’s death in the car crash: “Turn your pain into purpose.”

  So Diane was integrating spirituality and service into her broadcast; Christiane had achieved the unsurprising coup of an exclusive interview with the besieged Mubarek; and Katie—fresh from Egypt and rescuscitated by way of the lingering effect of her Palin interviews—was trying to hold on to her anchorship against a steady drumbeat that it was imperiled. They were respectively innovating, successfully competing, and working hard treading water. And each of them was doing so without ratings on their side, and with significant criticism. Reaching the top may have been triumphant, but it was also perilous.

  PART FIVE

  CANCELLATION

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Any White Male in the Chair . . .”

  Katie, Christiane, and Diane: 2011 to 2014

  BY EARLY 2011, Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News had eight million viewers, Diane Sawyer at ABC World News had seven million, and Katie at CBS Evening News had five million. From the beginning of Katie’s and then Diane’s tenure, Williams was always ahead, even though the focus and quality of the three broadcasts and the three news divisions were almost interchangeably similar.

  Paul Friedman says the unrelenting gender and number order was not an accident. “We had research at CBS that made it very, very clear that Katie was suffering because she was a woman. Eighteen to twenty percent of the people, in one of the pieces of research I saw, said they’d never watch a woman anchor the news.” “Never” is pretty extreme. Friedman reasons: “There’s still a certain proportion of the population that finds that women don’t have the credibility.” Indeed, Cronkite’s producer Sandy Socolow says, “You need some voice from Mount Olympus. That’s what’s missing now.” Socolow doesn’t put a gender on that Olympian voice, but many traditional viewers may fill it in as male.

  By late 2010, the conventional wisdom around CBS News was that “we could put any white male in the chair and get better numbers” than Katie’s. So says the CBS man who had had much to say about Katie’s rocky entrance to the network. Even a female producer there offers this cynical truth, adding “white man with white hair” to the depiction of the ideal anchor. Paul Friedman, again: “[We] believe[d] Scott Pelley would get better ratings than Katie, only because he’s a male. He’s not necessarily better than she is. He’s not necessarily a better reader. He’s not a better anything. But he is a male, and his ratings should go up.” When he replaced Katie, in mid-2011, CBS Evening News’s ratings did go up: Within three-quarters of a year of Pelley’s becoming anchor, the show gained almost a million viewers.

  By mid-2010, much of CBS News management—even those who’d been on shaky ground during Katie’s rough passage and had been vindicated by her Cronkite Award—were not averse to getting rid of her. The CBS man: “I had heard rumors that Sean and Paul had wanted her out before [the 2010 midterm] election but that Les had said no. Moonves did not want the controversy of her leaving. But everybody else in the news division was done—finished—with her, and her numbers were bad.” People were asking, “‘Why is she staying?’ But Moonves was basically saying no because he was terrified that he would be tagged with this failure. It would always be blamed on him.”

  One person who would not countenance any media games with Katie was Jeff Fager, the highly respected executive producer of 60 Minutes who had experienced Katie’s work on his show and was more than unimpressed. Someone who’s worked at 60 Minutes explains: “He just doesn’t like her. If you go to 60, you can’t take it as a sideshow. You can
’t walk in here like you own the place.” Another who worked at the show says: “The rap on her there was: Katie is lazy. She doesn’t put out the effort to make a piece better. She won’t struggle with you in the edit room, like Diane or Lesley always did. But if something was wrong, Katie would be quick to blame the producer.”

  In December 2010 it was rumored that Moonves was talking Fager into replacing Sean McManus. Moonves would be giving Fager the job of CBS News first chairman, a position Fager didn’t necessarily want, while allowing him to keep his role at his beloved 60 Minutes. The CBS man: “Apparently what Moonves did was: He was tired of all the stuff with Katie. So he went to Jeff and he said, ‘I want CBS run like 60 Minutes.’” While the talks between Moonves and Fager were apparently taking place—and with CBS Evening News’s ratings down to 5.73 million viewers a night (down almost a full 25 percent from when she took over)—an article appeared in Bloomberg News asserting that Katie would be willing to take a pay cut from her $15 million to stay on. Though the unsourced article made it sound as if “both sides” agreed that her salary needed to be reduced, the item seemed to unmistakably come from the Couric camp. Only her spokesman, Matthew Hiltzik, was quoted, saying, “Katie is enjoying herself at CBS and is proud of her award-winning show”; CBS’s spokesperson declined to comment. The piece sent the message to the public: It would now be churlish of CBS to not agree with Katie’s generous willingness to take a pay cut for a quality show that she loved. It was—almost transparently—a way to pressure CBS into agreeing to renew her contract. Planted items like this were said to have annoyed Moonves, but, nevertheless, it was thought within CBS News, he did not want to appear the heavy or be tagged with her failure.