The News Sorority Read online

  In February 2011, mere days after Katie returned from Egypt, Jeff Fager was officially named first chairman. The correspondent: “I think what Moonves got with the deal was, ‘It’s not my choice to fire Katie. It’s Jeff’s.’” In an interview with a trade magazine right after he took the job, Fager—diplomatically and with protective vagueness—said that he didn’t know whether Katie wanted to stay on as anchor but that he intended to talk to her about what was “best for both parties.” Then, immediately afterward, in his Daily Beast column, Howard Kurtz reported that “CBS has asked Katie Couric to stay on as anchor after her lucrative contract expires at the end of May, a source familiar with the situation [says].” Some suspected that the item was floated by Katie’s camp. Floated or not, this item was said to really have annoyed Fager. If Katie was behind it, “She made a big mistake doing that to Jeff,” says a senior producer. “You don’t manipulate Jeff. He does not care”—meaning: He won’t play defense against media-lobbed versions of events. “I know Katie wanted to stay—not forever, but through the 2012 election, this person continues.” But Fager’s ascent seemed to seal her fate. The CBS man says, “Everybody knew: Once Jeff was in, Katie was out. The minute Fager got the job, she was done.” “But,” says someone from NBC who had not always been her fan, “to defend Katie Couric—and I will defend her—CBS Evening News was in third place when she got there. And they’re still in third place. If CBS News is so great, how come they’re in third place? How come the boss of CBS thought they needed Katie Couric to get out of their doldrums? How come, if CBS News was so great, they didn’t have anybody to replace Dan Rather? All good questions.” Even better questions, perhaps: Since the CBS Evening News had won the Murrow Award for Best News Broadcast of 2008 and Best News Broadcast of 2009 (this in addition to Katie’s Murrow Award for the Sarah Palin interviews), why were they so eager to dump her?

  While plans to let her contract run out were being made, Katie and the media continued to play the it’s-her-choice game. On March 23 she appeared on David Letterman and he teased her about the signs she was putting out about wanting to leave. The Cronkite-Rather chair was “not like a temp gig,” he chided, and the Los Angeles Times entertainment blogger credulously assented enough to her scenario to write that “Moonves may not want to be publicly pursuing” Katie, since she “clearly has made [her] mind up” to leave. Meanwhile, the insiders at CBS News felt otherwise: The choice was not Katie’s.

  It’s interesting. In order for Diane to attain the ABC anchor chair, Charlie Gibson had to be out of the way. The story went out that she’d reluctantly taken the job only after Charlie assured Westin he wanted to leave. In a kind of opposite scenario, Katie was, for all intents and purposes, booted by Fager and Moonves, yet the official story was that she had left them. Two different egos—one with no fingerprints, and the other one, filled with bravado. Two very different women.

  In Katie’s case, though, there was perhaps more reason than mere pride for her to will that the choice be hers. Her entire career had been based on her nerve and chutzpah. She had broken down doors, sometimes literally. She knew what she wanted—she had chosen for herself. As Rick Kaplan had said, “You can’t tell Katie what to do.” In this wider context of agency, Moonves’s wooing of her for the anchor seat at CBS had been one of the first times she’d let someone else choose something for her and at least partly talk her into it. One could say that he’d used her to create an experiment based on three novelties: a solo female six-thirty anchor, a morning star in Cronkite’s chair, and an attempt to draw in a more youthful audience. Now that the experiment had failed—and now that her return to her show’s prior format had not brought about a sufficient course correction—she was collateral damage in his misbegotten experiment. Who could blame her for not wanting to look passive and tossed aside? She wanted agency, and if she couldn’t have it as literal truth, she would take it symbolically, for the sake of her self-esteem, her brand, and for the sake of other women who looked upon her as a pathbreaker.

  On April 26, 2011, an exclusive and highly newsbreaking (even if not entirely surprising) piece ran in a publication that Katie had selected. It was bombshell titled: “Katie Couric: I Am Leaving CBS Evening News.” “I have decided to step down from the CBS Evening News,” Couric announced to the interviewer, with the change going into effect in a month and a half. “I’m really proud of the talented team on the CBS Evening News and the award-winning work we’ve been able to do in the past five years in addition to the reporting I’ve done for 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning. In making the decision to move on, I know the Evening News will be in great hands, but I am excited about the future.”

  That she made the decision seem as if it had been hers when in fact it had been Fager’s and Moonves’s is not what bothered the CBS News people; they understood the politics of face-saving and they knew that Katie had one of the best publicists in the business. They also knew she had one of the best instincts for publicity in the business, and that she had pre-rebranded herself for the return to human interest coverage by, just now, publishing a book, The Best Advice I Ever Got, a compilation of inspirational, feel-good essays from the people she spent years interviewing, with the proceeds going to charity.

  No, what bothered the CBS News people is “that she announced it in People!” marvels the CBS man, with a tone of disgust bordering on admiration. Like it or not, Katie had had the nerve to break the stuffy rules of Hallowed News Anchor. She even went further: Perhaps thumbing her nose at “serious” critics whose disapproval had dogged her throughout her five years as CBS Evening News’s anchor, she celebrated her departure from the show by capping off her last night as anchor, in May, at a Manhattan karaoke bar. There, she did a rousing performance of “Build Me Up, Buttercup,” the anthem of UVA’s early preppy parties—“still dressed in a blue power suit,” as the New York Post pointed out, and fresh from the broadcast, no less. An on-air CBS reporter, speaking for colleagues as well, privately noted, of her choice of song, “That’s just about her speed.” Katie’s in-your-face “owning,” as it were, of her sorority-sister past may have been a statement: I am immune to your shortsighted put-downs of me for being insubstantial and perky; in fact, I’ll load you with evidence for your snobbism—I’ll get there first.

  But the karaoke night told only one side of the story. There was also a sad side to Katie’s loss of the anchorship, shared by her and her female colleagues. Three days after the announcement that she would be leaving, Katie was in London, covering Kate Middleton’s wedding to Prince William. The female CBS staffers and producers—even those who’d had trouble with her enormous salary and her complaints about the CBS ladies’ room and her star-who-waltzed-in-from-another-network attitude—even these women found themselves emotional that the first solo female six-thirty news anchor had failed to gain traction, that this landmark move would go down as a failure. “We were incredibly sad,” says one producer, a hardened pro. “A female correspondent and I were sitting in the hall, talking to Katie—and we both started to cry.” Katie, unhappy herself, tried to console them. “She said, ‘You’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna do fine. But still, I wish it had worked out.’” Katie paused and then said, wistfully: “‘Think of how cool that would have been . . .’”

  All three women agreed: “Yes, we overestimated America,” one says, speaking for their shared sentiment.

  “She did a great job anchoring the news,” says Rick Kaplan, about the blow dealt both of them. “And it was heartbreaking—heartbreaking—that she didn’t do better” in the ratings department. “She deserved better. She deserved way better. She should have been in first place.”

  Katie’s last broadcast, on Thursday, May 19, featured a low-key farewell reel, all the more poignant for its brevity. Over the Beatles song “In My Life” was a montage of clips of Katie with Obama and McCain during the 2008 campaign; with Palin, of course; with the survivors of the Virginia Tech shooting; with Ahmadinejad
; with Sully; in a helicopter over the California wildfires; in Egypt and Japan; getting George W. Bush to say he wished Abu Ghraib had never happened. It ended smartly with Clint Eastwood obliging Katie by saying, “Go ahead—make my day.”

  “And to all of you watching, thank you so much for coming along with me on this incredible journey. From CBS Evening News, for tonight, I’m Katie Couric. Good night.” And then the woman who had been America’s first female solo six-thirty news anchor was off the air.

  • • •

  KATIE SET OUT to craft a syndicated afternoon show—the revenue available from this genre, Daytime, could be enormous. So was the risk. But Katie would imminently have the best partner for the venture: Jeff Zucker. After climbing the professional mountain at NBC to the topmost perch—president and CEO of NBC Universal—Jeff had met his stumbling block just as she was meeting hers: His disastrous decision, in 2010, to push Jay Leno down to ten p.m. and give Conan O’Brien Leno’s eleven p.m. slot had cost him his job. When he was eased out (with a handsome payoff), he reunited with the now unemployed Katie.

  Katie and Jeff—the dream team duo—took meetings with suitors, who eagerly courted them. The bosses at CNN were “blown away” by Katie, says a person who “took her to meet one of our executives” and “she just dazzled him. She had a good dozen strong story ideas—they ran the gamut from science to international to pop culture.” Two executives were “so impressed.”

  In the spring of 2011 the media was buzzing about where she would land. Despite CNN’s heart on its sleeve at the time, the NBC man who had been Katie’s critic (saying she hadn’t waited “her turn”) would turn out to be somewhat prescient in describing the situation at the time: “Katie Couric can go to CNN and triple their ratings without doing anything. But basically how she feels is, ‘I’m never going to go to another place to save it.’ She was called in to save CBS and that didn’t work. So she’s labeled a ‘failure’ at CBS. The Today show has never done better than without her. They don’t want her back.” His assessment illustrates this fact: Highly paid news stars—and news-plus-entertainment stars—have as much to lose as to gain when they’re called in to use their stellar brand to rescue a wobbly project or niche or network.

  This man, like others, saw the risk Katie was looking at in mid-2011. “With a daytime syndicated show, she’s now going to be compared to Oprah Winfrey, and she cannot possibly reach those heights.” (Even Oprah had stopped reaching her own heights. At her peak, in the 1990s, she could pull in thirteen million viewers a day; by the time she ended her show in May 2011, she had more than halved that number, down to an average of six million viewers.) “Either Katie rights this [failure] trajectory with her syndicated show or it’s over for her.” (His remarks would prove to be accurate.) Oprah had just left the air in a massive multiweek ceremonial send-off, and even her reduced-by-her-own-standards numbers had been an important impetus to shows that followed.

  “One of the things holding Diane Sawyer up was the Oprah Winfrey number at four o’clock. With television, it’s all about the flow”—the segue from one hit show to another show on the same network that profits from the dial setting. Among industry insiders, the smart money was on Katie going to ABC—joining Diane at the network where Diane had been a queen for twenty-two years. A female news star who’d long worked with Diane, and who had quickly failed in a format that Katie had better succeeded at, narrowed her eyes and said, of the prospect of Katie and Diane (seemingly power equals) being at the same network: “Katie will not know what hit her”—alluding to Diane’s creamy politicking, her no-fingerprints perfection.

  Indeed, ABC president Anne Sweeney made a big, expensive woo of Katie—and won her—for a reported whopping $40 million a year. It was soon announced that Katie would be bringing her syndicated show to ABC in September 2012. Excitement reigned. So did apprehension. In getting a three p.m. show with Katie, the ABC local affiliates were losing out on a competitive offering—a talk show hosted by Queen Latifah—and some feared that the charismatic actress-singer would do better with their viewers than the charismatic Morning queen and recently rebuffed news anchor.

  • • •

  THE SUMMER OF 2011 was hard for Diane. The loss of Oprah as a lead-in from four to five p.m. hurt her. Even more, so did Scott Pelley’s replacement of Katie as CBS Evening News anchor. Earnest, chiseled-featured, with prematurely white hair at fifty-four (the same age as the departing Couric), Pelley was, like Rather and Schieffer, a Texan. He was almost militarily stiff; he projected decency and manliness. He’d been a CBS newsman for over twenty years—a correspondent on major stories, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing two years later; a 60 Minutes hand; and the network’s chief White House correspondent. With the selection of Pelley, Fager seemed to be saying: We are going back to the old CBS ways. (Although some things had changed: In Pat Shevlin, Pelley acquired the first ever female executive producer of CBS Evening News.)

  With Pelley at CBS, Diane’s viewership fell. It wouldn’t take long before gossip began to circulate around ABC that Diane was, as an insider phrased it, “putting out the story that she [was] dissatisfied with the editorial direction of the show.” It was also known that Mike Nichols was having health problems and that Diane’s mother—the indomitable Jean Sawyer Hayes—was not well. Further gossip inside ABC had it that, as the onetime friend of Ben Sherwood’s says, “It’s in the budget that she’ll be let go” as anchor, probably to be replaced by one of her main correspondents (and anchoring substitute) David Muir.

  Muir would be far less expensive. This person says, “I can’t imagine she would willingly walk away—her entire history is the acquisition of power. There are three reasons she [will be involuntarily] going: One, she makes too much money”—an estimated $14 million to $17 million a year—“and no one should be making that much money at a show that’s not making money. Second, evening news viewers are sexist. Scott Pelley is doing serious news that no one wants to hear yet his ratings are good because he’s a man.” Third, relating to Sherwood’s and Sawyer’s history, this person says, “What goes around comes around.” Another person who knows Sherwood well and keeps up with ABC information says that when he became president of the ABC news division, in some subtle form or another, “Ben lorded it over Diane.”

  • • •

  CHRISTIANE ON SUNDAY MORNING was suffering a fate similar to Diane’s. Before Christiane took over, This Week had for years been number two, right behind the unbeatable Meet the Press. Now, by her anchorship’s one-year anniversary—August 2011—it had slipped and Face the Nation became number two. Christiane was in last place. In the fall, rumors of her demise started to churn. As fall deepened into early winter, they got louder.

  On December 13, it was announced in the New York Times that Christiane was leaving her anchor position at This Week, to be re-replaced by George Stephanopoulos, and that she would return to CNN, but to CNN International, a station somewhat hard to find on the U.S. television dial. The dismissal from This Week was face-saved for her by the announcement that, “in a unique arrangement with ABC News, Christiane will continue to report for [ABC’s] news programs, as well” as “global affairs anchor.” But this arrangement was announced by CNN, not ABC, and it was not “unique”—she had already divided her time between two networks, CBS and CNN, for years. Still, the CNN representative continued: “We could not be happier than to welcome back to the CNN organization the leading international journalist working in television news, who also happens to be our longtime colleague and friend.”

  This last sentiment was undoubtedly sincere, except its warmth disguised the fact that she would not be in the main CNN America lineup; she would not have her own easy-to-find-on-the-dial show, like Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta, Fareed Zakaria, Piers Morgan, Wolf Blitzer. She would be “international.” This was not without great reach—her new show would be broadcast in about two hundred countries, as well
as being seen in America, on the CNN International station, for two half-hour segments, at two p.m. and five p.m. She had always been international when she was in the field, and she’d used it to her advantage, both in having the relative freedom to select atrocities and little-known stories of injustice to cover—and in some places, like Bosnia, becoming famous and crucially influential for it. Now, without having compromised a bit of her integrity or her credibility, she was nevertheless slipping further into the background. Her earned opportunity to be a widely watched anchor-editorialist had been unsuccessful.

  What was perhaps most ironic, but yet unremarked upon, from a historical perspective, was this: Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite—major war reporters—had advanced from their field-reporter positions to permanent hallowed anchor (for Cronkite) and permanent hallowed commentator (for Murrow) desks, with respect and authority and safety, which they had rightly earned.

  And yet, in our current age, when feminism has supposedly triumphed, a major war reporter returned to war zones—a mere two months after giving birth—and then spent seven subsequent years going back into high-risk zones again and again and again. Yet she—having been dismissed from her major network weekend news roundup show— faced a choice of lessers of evil: a daily TV posting where few in America would see her, or the default option that those men had not even needed to consider: a return to the active, dangerous “male” world of war. She took the former choice.

  Christiane would be back working with her good friend Liza McGuirk, but she was essentially off the center of the U.S. television stage. This new international show, again named Amanpour, debuted in April 2012. “It is where she belongs,” said Liza, in an interview for this book a month before the show’s launch, admitting that “the fact is, it’s getting harder and harder for journalists to find a place where they can do serious international news, but the responsibility [felt by] these people whose entire lives [have been spent on such news] is overwhelming. Christiane herself knows this.” Ironically, despite the shortage of venues for serious international news, there was no shortage of young people inspired into that career—by Christiane, as Liza’s in-box showed. “There’s a Christiane cult. I get flooded with résumés from them: young women, and men, who grew up watching her on CNN and went into the news business because of her, the way people in my generation did because of Watergate.”