The News Sorority Page 49
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MEANWHILE, KATIE’S SYNDICATED three p.m. show, Katie—with the tagline “Talk That Matters”—launched on ABC in September 2012, with Jeff Zucker working with her on it. The promotional photo of Katie for her new show was, appropriately, a 180-degree turn from short-simple-haired, unsmiling Katie the News Anchor. This Katie looked ten years younger—subtle, repeated plastic surgery and artful Botox are part of every TV personality’s stock in trade, men included. She had her hair curled slightly under her chin. Her winsome smile was oddly non-Katie-like—too saccharine for any earlier iteration of her personality. After snarky, jokey Morning and all-business Evening, this picture obliterated both sides of her personality; in it, she seemed to be trying too hard to be Daytime. But then—like Christiane, who had faced a poor choice—Katie was stuck with a poor choice, too. The experiment she’d been wooed by Moonves into trying had failed, and she could not go back to Morning, which had been her most successful slot. Although she had recently done a week’s worth of filling in for vacationing Robin Roberts at GMA—which had her vying for ratings with her longtime partner Matt Lauer—it was generally understood that the past was the past, and her guest-hosting was merely an homage, a wink—and a frank ratings-wars stunt.
You had to hand it to Katie, in a way—she followed the format she was in. The positive interpretation? She was a pro, a good soldier, free of pesty ego, shaping her visual image to audience expectation. The negative one? She was a chameleon: confusing, perhaps slightly untrustworthy. Also, Daytime was frankly lowbrow—certainly in comparison to Evening, but also more so than Morning. She was going from highest to lowest, and taking a bet: She would give up status in exchange for a lucrative syndication, if her show was a success.
Daytime syndication involves complicated math. Affiliates pay marketing fees to carry the show, and Katie’s fees were high—thus the risk was elevated at the outset. The two markers of a new syndicated show’s succeeding are: its ability to equal the viewership of the show it follows in the Daytime lineup (different shows, depending on the market), and how well it does next to the show that had formerly been in its time slot on the network (also often a different show for each market).
Katie had a great first week—huge promotion, high viewership. When she strode out onto her new Katie stage, in her chic blue sheath and sky-high heels, frankly expressing her nervousness, the small, close-in audience of women applauded wildly. One could almost see her calibrating what her former colleague at NBC had said: This was her last shot; she could not fail here. One perhaps could also regret that she’d left evening news for Daytime, in which audiences of women (the word “housewives,” while sexist, seems not only apt for Daytime, but desired) applauded wildly.
Maury Povich, Sally Jesse Raphael, Montel Williams, Tyra Banks: These were the second- and third-rate wannabe Oprahs, past and present, some laughing to the bank and enduring, others short-lived. Steve Harvey was successful. Ellen DeGeneres had proved you could be a fresh daytime interviewer with staying power and dignity, but she was an entertainer, not a newsperson. Katie had to wedge herself into a tight space: Be the best of her funny, personality-driven, great-interviewer self without letting her show descend to the sometimes ratings-driven, inescapable lower end of the genre’s wobbly bar. Her immediate competitors on the other networks were Harvey, Jeff Probst, and Ricki Lake.
One of Katie’s earliest shows was the essence of the best the show could be: an hour with Aimee Copeland, the lovely young University of West Georgia graduate student who, four months before, had fallen off a trip-line over a rural river and been ravaged by flesh-eating bacteria, losing parts of all four of her limbs. Katie’s show—Aimee’s first ever interview—was up there with the best of Oprah: from the footage of the accident and horrific aftermath; to the rousing, no-dry-eye welcome of Aimee appearing for the first time publicly, walking on her custom walker, across the stage; to the sit-down with Katie. Copeland’s stunningly positive attitude was one of those rare times when the word “inspiring” is not an empty cliché. Finally, there was the ultimate Oprah-like touch—a surprise present: a customized van, as a gift from a munificent donor, for Aimee to drive.
About a week later, Katie did a show that was very personally important to her: on the underdiscussed epidemic of dating violence. Katie had been deeply shaken by the May 2010 murder of UVA star lacrosse player Yeardley Love following a rageful, drunken beating by her boyfriend, fellow student and athlete George Huguely, who had had a largely undisclosed history of violence. (Huguely was convicted of second-degree murder.) Yeardley Love had not only attended Katie’s alma mater but she resembled Katie, physically and in her outgoing personality. On the September 20 show, Yeardley’s mother and sister told Katie how they had expressed their concern about Huguely to Yeardley and urged her to get a restraining order against him. It was a powerful show—a high point for Daytime—blending a “get” (the family) with tragic human interest and a service takeaway about the prevalence, and need for prevention, of dating violence.
In another early show, Katie did a paired interview with Sheryl Crow and Jessica Simpson, minting an idea—offbeat pairings—that would be a viewer favorite. Bill Carter of the New York Times announced that, in her first week, she “scored the best initial rating number for a new talk entry since Dr. Phil in 2002.” But Carter warned, “Ms. Couric has bolted out of the gate with great ratings before, however. For her first newscast as the anchor of CBS Evening News in 2006, she attracted an enormous audience” after a similarly “enormous promotion campaign,” only, of course, to plummet. Katie’s high ratings would last for the show’s first several months.
The show settled into a format with what seemed to be four quadrants. First, there were celebrity interviews a few days a month—the substantial (Barbra Streisand, Susan Sarandon, Alicia Keys, Olympic medalist Gabby Douglas, Jessica Chastain, Celine Dion) and the cheesy (Howard Stern, Judge Judy, Bill O’Reilly). Sometimes she put the celebrities in fun pairings (Billy Crystal and Bette Midler) or unexpected back-to-back twofers (Kerry Washington and Mike Tyson, Magic Johnson and Kathy Ireland) that brought in two different potential segments of her audience. Shows about serious social issues (autism, transgendered children, domestic violence, eating disorders, Facebook COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg talking about women and ambition) and serious tragedies (Hurricane Sandy, the mass murder of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut) constituted the second genre. The third category encompassed tabloid scandals and sensational theme shows: “Amanda Knox’s Boyfriend Breaks His Silence”; “Shocking Medical Mistakes”; “Married to a Monster”; “Dying to Be Beautiful—Beauty Trends That Prove to Be Lethal.” Lightweight service, feel-good features, and girl talk rounded things out (“The Hair Show”; “The Friendship Show”; “Redbook’s Hottest Husbands”; “Kate Middleton Look-alike and Ordinary People in the Spotlight”).
In November 2012 Katie learned that her show was losing Zucker, who had been tapped to become the president of CNN in January 2013. It was an unfortunate loss: Over the next number of months, replacement EPs were signed and dismissed and replaced. But by now Katie had a happy romance going with a man who was closer in age to her (six rather than sixteen years younger): John Molner, a handsome banker and partner in Brown Brothers Harriman.
In late January, Katie scored its newsiest scoop: an appearance by Notre Dame football player Manti Te’O, who had garnered great sympathy months earlier by playing a game despite the fact that the love of his life, a pretty girl named Lennay Kekua, whom he had never met in person but had spent many hours with over the Internet and phone, had taken seriously ill and died, at around the same time that his grandfather had also passed away. When the Web site Deadspin revealed, in January 2013, that Kekua was a fictional character, the public turned on Te’O, believing he had staged the fake drama as a sympathy and publicity stunt. Then a close friend of Te’O’s confessed to creating the hoax. Ma
ny people remained cynical . . . until the wholesome Samoan American athlete appeared with his parents on Katie and came off as an excessively naive, good-hearted young man who had probably been conned, triggering wider understanding that “catfishing,” the creation of false Internet persona, was not an uncommon phenomenon. Katie’s questioning was tough—or, rather, seemed tough—but the fact that she and Te’O shared Matthew Hiltzik (Katie’s publicist and Te’O’s crisis consultant) would have arguably constituted a conflict of interest if she had been interviewing him on her evening news, as opposed to her afternoon, show.
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THE PERIOD DECEMBER 2012 to January 2013 brought much change, epiphany, and questioning for the three women. Katie was dealing with the shock of Jeff Zucker leaving her show and also with the triumph of the Te’O get. Diane was facing four things at once: Mike’s temporary health challenges, her ninety-three-year-old mother’s declining health, and the need for Diane to care for her in her off time, and Barbara Walters’s announcement of her intended 2014 retirement. There were also nagging rumors that, in covering the 2012 presidential election night with her ABC teammates, she had been tipsy—footage that had gone viral indicated that she was not at her best. Ultimately, there was no way of knowing whether she had excessively celebrated earlier that evening (Election Day, November 6, was also Mike’s eighty-first birthday) or whether she was just exhausted.
Christiane had just come off a meaningful, and personal, story. It had started the previous summer. Tasked with yet another special set in the Middle East—this one for ABC, on her new contract—Christiane did something new: She drafted her twelve-year-old son to be her companion, including on-screen. Darius Rubin himself wrote an endearing blog post, which pulled a curtain open on Christiane the correspondent and mother, that duality she’d struggled with so intensely for the first seven years of his life and which remained a mystery, if not wholly unknown, to most people. Katie, after all, had shared her motherhood, frequently, with her viewers; rarely did she not talk about her daughters when interviewed in magazines. Few of Christiane’s viewers even knew she had a child—that’s not what they tuned in to her for. So, whether or not many CNN.com viewers read it, Darius Rubin’s words were a kind of offering: Here I am, and here’s my mom. She’s not just a serious, world-class international journalist sparring with dictators and tyrants; she’s a woman cajoling a preteenage boy to give up his summer to hang out with her:
This summer, my mom was planning a trip to Egypt to explore the history of the Bible. She wanted me to come with her, but I wasn’t really excited at first. I wanted to spend the summer hanging out with my friends and didn’t feel like taking a 30-hour trip to the middle of nowhere. But my spirits were raised when I realized I got to have my own Flip camera and to be one of the “assistant” film crew everywhere we went—that was pretty cool. And when we finally did get to Egypt, I knew going was definitely the right decision. It was an amazing trip.
Darius went on, in his blog, to say, “I even got in some target practice from the air when I tried to spit into a river from the balloon (Mom was not happy with my efforts).” A quite endearing touch.
Darius described his mother as being “pretty shocked” that the man (disguised as a Bedouin) who drove them through the Egyptian desert had a gun, in case any marauding thieves approached the car. “But I was never scared,” Darius assured, charmingly macho and in control at twelve. “The driver seemed like a pretty capable guy, and I thought he could protect us. I didn’t want to be kidnapped or anything, but the whole experience was kind of exciting because it felt like being in a movie.”
Christiane’s—and Darius’s—special, Back to the Beginning, which vivified the Bible from Genesis to Jesus, aired right before and after Christmas 2012. As part of its narration, Christiane said that, although she had spent much of her career covering bloodshed and strife in the region, “the three Abrahamic faiths mean more to me than war and suffering. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have come together during some of the happiest and most important moments of my life. In fact, my son Darius is the embodiment of these three faiths in one. You see, I grew up in Iran, the child of a Christian mother and a Shiite Muslim father. I attended Catholic church in Tehran right up until the Islamic Revolution. The man I married is Jewish American, and we were wed by a priest and then under a Jewish chuppah. And now, the blood of these three great peoples runs through the veins of my son.” For those who wished to see it, this was a different—a wholer, more intimate—Christiane than anyone was used to.
In June 2013, Christiane took a further step in putting her family first while continuing to work: She and Darius and Jamie, who had recently quit his latest job as chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, moved back to London. London: her “spiritual home,” as Bella had called it. London—home to Patricia and Mohammed and Lizzy and Leila and Fiona.
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ON JANUARY 29, 2013, several media outlets broke a story that Diane was, as the New York Daily News put it, “seriously considering retirement as early as this year.” The online gossip wing of the newspaper reported that “‘[s]he has discussed’” the option of retirement with “‘a few close friends and some people at ABC,’ said our insider. She said she’ll be ready to hang it up not long down the road. She loves work and what she does and has endless energy, but she’s overwhelmed with personal problems and she is thinking about leaving to take care of her family.” (ABC immediately, reassuringly refuted that report.) From the tone of this and other parts of the statement, it seems to have come from a close colleague and champion of Diane’s and may well have been a kind of preemptive, no-fingerprints-all-fingerprints strike in case Ben Sherwood did replace her with Muir. I’m quitting, not being fired was the message. As with Christiane’s anger at CNN for subordinating her to Fareed Zakaria and her subsequent move to ABC’s This Week—and, especially now, her moving “home” to her family’s city, London; and like Katie’s interpreting her dismissal from CBS as her own decision, here was a case of Diane attempting to control her career’s own narrative. Predictably, a representative for ABC said, “That’s a bunch of nonsense. As we made clear, Diane’s plans for 2013 haven’t changed in any way.”
Three and a half months later, in mid-May, Barbara Walters announced on The View that she would be retiring in May 2014. Bill Carter wrote, “Like Johnny Carson, another television standout who took charge of his exit from the national stage, Ms. Walters is picking her television end date exactly one year in advance: over the next year she will participate in a series of retrospectives on ABC prime-time news programs and her home on The View, seeking, she said, ‘to say goodbye in the best way.’”
Two and a half months after that announcement, triumphant news came out. As the New York Times put it in a headline, “ABC News Dethrones NBC in Crucial Ratings Race.” Here came Brian Stelter’s nut graph, a stunning, seeming victory for Diane, and all women anchors:
ABC’s 6:30 newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer, bested NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams among 25-to-54-year-old viewers last week, ending a winning streak of almost five years by NBC and rekindling interest in the once-predictable ratings competition.
But much farther down—in the second-to-last paragraph—came this:
In a twist that television industry gawkers immediately homed in on, the victory was shared by Ms. Sawyer and one of her regular fill-ins, David Muir. That was because Mr. Muir substituted for Ms. Sawyer three nights last week—the same three nights, it turned out, that ABC beat NBC in the all-important ratings demographic. Mr. Williams prevailed, barely, on the two nights that Ms. Sawyer was at work.
It was a stinging irony. After all these years of women’s gains in the news business—still, the only way a woman could beat out a man on the six-thirty news was by way of another man sitting in for her. There was an even greater irony—or inconsistency, or even, one might say, a kind of lack of network’s gratitude t
oward the anchor: In 2013, ABC World News won the Murrow Award for best news broadcast of the year. Yet this was the year that the possibly defensively self-generated rumors of Diane’s retirement were most pointed. Similarly, CBS Evening News had won the Murrow in 2008 and in 2009, yet that hadn’t helped Katie: a year and a half later, she was out the door.
Stelter ended the article with the suggestion that Muir (or George Stephanopoulos) was “widely seen” to take over for Diane. “For now,” he hastened to say, “that is purely theoretical; Ms. Sawyer . . . has given no signal that she plans to step down soon.”
Few would say that Diane’s floating of the rumor of her retirement thoughts was not a good move under these circumstances. And as Barbara’s May 2014 retirement date neared, she could easily leave the anchor chair—to Muir, or someone else—and waltz into Barbara’s position.
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WHILE DIANE WAS absorbing this humiliation, Katie was enmeshed in drama. The high viewership of Katie had fallen off. The show was renewed for a second season, which would start in September 2013, but it was the third season that was in question. The New York Post picked up industry gossip. “The show was oversold at syndication and hasn’t lived up to expectations,” said one source. In other words, of the two key things that had to happen—that it would hold or improve on the show it followed in most of its markets and that it would do better than the previous show that was in its time slot in the market—neither had happened in enough of the markets. “Oversold” meant that its licensing fees had been too high to make it worthwhile.