The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Meanwhile, back at NBC, Today did an extensive interview with an eyewitness, Jennifer Oberstein, who had just emerged from the subway at the nearby Bowling Green station when the mysterious explosion occurred. A field producer got her on the phone with Katie and Matt at 8:54. Oberstein’s persistently emotional words—contrasted with Katie’s and Matt’s controlled, precise queries—gave the first hint that what had happened was catastrophic.

  “We have a breaking story to tell you about. Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center,” Katie announced. “Jennifer, can you tell us what you saw?”

  “It’s quite terrifying!” Oberstein said. “It’s unbelievable! It’s mind-boggling! . . . I’ve never seen any fire like this in the air! It’s like the top twenty floors! It’s horrible! I can’t describe it!”

  “Do you have any idea what kind of plane it was?” Katie pressed. “We’re getting reports that an airplane hit the buildings.”

  Jennifer: “We were all saying around here that it’s so strange that it was a bomb and so high up!”

  “Jennifer,” Katie continued calmly, “can you describe it for us?”

  Matt now entered the conversation: “Jennifer, it’s Matt Lauer. Have you seen anybody taken out of the building? Have you seen any ambulances?”

  “The smoke is incredible!” Jennifer continued.

  “Jennifer,” Katie pressed, “do you have any idea what kind of plane it was?”* Before she could answer, Katie was fed the latest—erroneous—information in her earpiece, which she duly reported: “Right now we’re getting information that it was a small commuter plane.”

  Now Matt started analyzing for viewers—as they simultaneously viewed the footage—the angle of entry and the fact that both sides of the building showed damage. He astutely noted that it must have been a larger plane to make that impact. Jennifer kept obsessing: It was “a big ball of fire!” Katie filled time by saying that onlookers were “obviously horrified. Commuters were obviously devastated. And we have to surmise because of the time that there were people in the buildings.”

  At 9:00 a.m. Matt speculated that this could be an “intentional act.”

  Of course, the plane that hit the tower was American Flight 11 from Boston, hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists—the first of four planes to be overtaken. Over at ABC, at 9:03, the monitors showed the second plane, later identified as United Flight 175, heading into the South Tower. At 9:04, Diane solemnly said, “We had seen the plane circling in from another direction. Charlie, I don’t know if it was the same plane, but Charlie, did you—?” And then she clarified it as “a second plane coming around the other side.” In a YouTube clip containing unaired audio material from the broadcast, people can be heard screaming, “A different plane! Oh, shit! Another plane! Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit! ”

  Charlie echoed, “That looks like a second plane.”

  “Oh, my God,” Diane said softly.

  “So it looks like some kind of concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center,” Charlie concluded, just as Matt had done over at Today.

  Unlike Pearl Harbor, unlike John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, marked the first time that world-stopping events occurred in real time during morning television. “Morning owned that story,” says a producer at Today. That day, and as the next days marched on in a shell-shocked city, “the morning shows did a much better job than the evening news.” And what events that first half day brought! They were confusing, conflicting, surreal, and frightening—not merely these two attacks, but the third plane, American Flight 77, hitting the Pentagon at 9:37; the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:59; the collapse of the North Tower at 10:28; the fourth plane, United Flight 93, headed for the Capitol, crashing to the ground in a field in Pennsylvania at 10:07 (after televised reports that it had been shot down by government-ordered U.S. aircraft); and the forced grounding of every single commercial plane from U.S. skies.

  Amid the horror of the day and the days that followed, there was the strong relief at ABC that Diane was in that chair beside Charlie. Says the senior staffer: “Once they knew it was a terrorist attack, you really saw their humanity—the water in the eyes.” Says the executive who was in on the December 1998 vetting meeting, “When 9/11 happened, we were like, ‘This was so the right decision,’” hiring Diane for GMA. “That was the turning point in a lot of people’s minds. The notion of having Kevin and Lisa take the country through 9/11 . . .” The thought trails off. The tragedy tested Diane because “she had to be live. This was a moment of: Throw it all out there! Bring everything you’ve ever covered—and all your knowledge and all your sensitivities. With people not knowing where their relatives were, people being fearful,” the public needed gentle, authoritative gravitas. “Diane pulled it off. She found her tone, she found her sea legs. She was brilliant.”

  The sheer war zone emergency of it all brought out the gonzo reporting chops Diane had nurtured at CBS in Washington, D.C. As soon as she was off the air, she grabbed Anna Robertson and said, “‘We’ve got to get down there immediately!’” Anna recalls. “By the time we got down there everything was blocked off. We had to wiggle our way down there and get as close as possible. We took off our shoes and ran. We just reported there all night.” Diane saw a fellow with a video camera and drafted him on the spot. The man, one Bucky Turco, was standing with what he called “my shitty camcorder” and recalled that “Diane asks me to join her film crew; there’s evidently a ‘media blackout’ around Ground Zero and they need some guerrilla camera work. They give me a paper towel roll to conceal the camera.” Diane told Turco: “Do your best. I’m walking away to distract attention from you. Just keep shooting everything you can shoot.” As for the other ABC staffers: Charlie tried to get to the site by ferry in the Hudson River, but was not able to; George Stephanopoulos and his producer rushed downtown, and the two men “returned to the control room,” Shelley Ross recalls, “covered, head to toe, in white residue from the building collapse, as if they’d been rolled in flour. They would have been killed had they not been pulled into a store in time.”

  Continues Anna Robertson: “Diane and one of the producers, Dennis O’Brien, ran into the rubble, and she pulled out a bunch of documents—financial records, people’s items. We went live on the air with that. We just covered everything. Peter Jennings and Diane did the show live from the site that night.” Phyllis McGrady: “Diane stayed up all night” and did the show the next morning on no sleep.

  Katie was down at Ground Zero, too, surveying the apocalypse in a hard hat. Yael Federbush says, “Everyone just had to kick into gear. It was all hands on deck—we all came to the studio, we worked around the clock. I remember calling hospitals and trying to find out how many injured there were and there were no numbers” because there were virtually no “injured.” Among the most poignant images of the story were the lines of empty ambulances outside the class-A trauma center hospitals; the queues of citizens standing for hours to give blood when none was needed because almost everyone in those buildings, and everyone on those planes, had perished; and the desperate “MISSING!” posters of fresh-scrubbed good-looking young faces plastered on building walls all over the city. Shelley Ross says that, during these early days, “around the office you’d see someone on the phone suddenly keel over sobbing.” It was a common occurrence at Today as well.

  The morning staffs and producers on both shows worked unceasingly; the coverage was wall to wall. Yet despite the sense of profound emergency and need for team spirit, there was rank-pulling at ABC. According to one who worked closely with Peter Jennings, Jennings was as imperious now as he had been at Princess Diana’s funeral, when he’d crowded out Diane and Barbara. After the first night, Jennings blocked Diane from the most in-the-trenches coverage, and, in a puzzling nitpick, he even strongly recommended that she take her customary vase of flowers off her desk because he th
ought such a touch was inappropriate under the circumstances. But Charlie Gibson was worse. About the fifth or sixth day after 9/11, Charlie complained that Diane had been reading more of the show’s “cold opens” than he was. (The reading of the cold opens at GMA was generally randomly alternated, according to such minor factors as whether Charlie or Diane came out of makeup first.) To appease Charlie, Shelley Ross immediately told Gibson he could read all the cold opens from then on, and she instructed the writers to adjust future scripts. His behavior in the face of the tragedy was “so petty as to be pathological,” an insider says, and it suggested the depth of his resentment of Diane. Explains another insider: “Charlie was a serious person and a war horse. He had been kicked off the show earlier and he got pulled back in, and he went back in, head down, good-soldiering on his way—and Diane got all the attention and she controlled it.”

  The rivalry between Diane and Charlie would erupt more significantly—and secretly—in 2005, and again in 2009.

  • • •

  SEPTEMBER 11 WAS FOLLOWED by the anthrax attacks of September 18—attacks leveled against the TV news media itself. Letters containing the lethal, highly air-transmittable bacteria arrived in the newsrooms at ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News, among other sites, and security was tightened and nerves were on edge while everyone, Diane and Katie included, went about their now twelve- to fourteen-hour days reporting on the still very pressing catastrophic attacks of the week before. Soon, a number of anthrax letters were mailed to Senators Tom Daschle, Patrick Leahy, and Russ Feingold and their staffs. Many people initially believed that these attacks were the second part of an al-Qaeda one-two punch. It was only later determined that the anthrax attacks, which killed five people, including some postal workers, had been the work of domestic actors.

  On October 15 Katie took a leave from work and rushed to her sister Emily’s bedside, where she and the rest of the Couric family remained during her painful last three days. Emily died on October 18, and at the funeral at St. Paul’s Church on the UVA campus, Katie spoke movingly to the two thousand mourners of her sister. “She taught me not about dying but about living,” Katie said, as bell-clear to this gathering as Emily herself had been less than three years earlier, reciting Katie’s eulogy for Jay at his funeral. With true Katie bluntness, she didn’t hedge from issues others might leave out, such as the irritating fame disparity between the revered and accomplished oldest and once scrappy younger sibling. “Emily found it mildly annoying when she was asked, ‘Are you Katie Couric’s sister?’” she told the mourners, a sentiment Katie later seconded, with rare anger in her voice, when talking to Larry King. “The truth is, I’ve always been and forever will be so proud to say I am Emily Couric’s sister.”

  Betsy Howell remembers that Katie seemed to be feeling “disbelief that this had happened again,” and she was especially concerned about how this would affect her parents—her mother now seventy-eight, her father eighty-one. Later Katie wrote her childhood friend Janie McMullen Florea a note, thanking Janie for coming. In the note, Katie let her hair down, as only one could to an intimate, by adding a remark in the high Katie vernacular: “What can I say other than this is a big suck sandwich?”

  The terrorist attacks of September 11, the anthrax letters, Emily’s death, Katie’s impatience with her bedeviling curse of the perky persona: “Everything was pushing Katie to be more serious,” a senior staffer for Today says. “This was a moment in Katie’s mind that cemented how important she wanted her role to be.” In her interviews, “she gravitated naturally to people like Ann Richards. I remember her coming back and telling me once, ‘Ann Richards says the show isn’t as good as it used to be.’ She gravitated to Condoleezza Rice, she gravitated to Hillary Clinton. Before 9/11 she had been aware of the frivolous parts of the show being frivolous.” After 9/11 that awareness of hers became exacerbated. “That was it—we increased the focus on hard news.” Both of the morning shows did a sobering swivel from watercooler tabloid fare, forced to acknowledge that this was a different time.

  This person sees this period as “the height of Katie’s power zone, the top of her game at the Today show,” when Katie achieved “the transformation from singular star of that morning genre to a powerful person seeking something more.” Indeed, in mid-December 2001, Katie got a kind of Christmas present: She signed a contact “reaching beyond $60 million for the next four and a half years,” wrote Bill Carter in the New York Times—the largest contract ever signed in TV news. Some estimates put the total at $65 million for the four years. Katie’s agent Alan Berger had skillfully solicited outside offers to get the auction up that high. One came from Don Hewitt, bidding on behalf of 60 Minutes. DreamWorks tendered an offer, as did AOL Time Warner. Katie’s $15 million to $16 million a year remuneration would include both salary and stock in NBC’s parent company, General Electric. For this record-breaking paycheck, she would also be expected to do occasional evening specials, matching Diane’s continuing evening specials and interviews for ABC. (Ten years later, a reality check: Matt Lauer’s 2013 salary was $25 million, roughly $9 million more per year than Katie’s was then.)

  Katie’s staggering salary was made public—and she was proud of it. In retrospect, leaking the figure would prove to be a mistake. A male executive from a different network puts a very negative spin on the disclosure, reflecting the feelings of many at the time: “Katie was ‘over’ the day she signed her last contract with the Today show. When people knew that she was going to make as much as $65 million, she was no longer the girl next door but a rich, recently bereaved, skirt-up-to-her-crotch, hair-changing woman. It can offend you all you want for me to put it that way, but it is a fact.”

  Indeed, stoked by the news of her glamorous new salary and glamorous boyfriend, the media started sniping at Katie’s hair and clothes, which enraged the women at Today. Says someone who worked with Katie, “Do they do that to guys? I haven’t noticed them commenting on the ties, the slicked-back hair” of male anchors. “‘He used to have a middle part, now he has a side part.’” Allison Gollust adds, “And they’d do it to Diane, too. ‘Here’s what Diane wore. Here’s what Katie wore.’ We’d think, ‘They don’t do it between Charlie Gibson and Tom Brokaw in the evening!’ Katie had no problem with Diane. You’d see them at events together and they were perfectly cordial. Yes, their shows were rivals. There were hundreds of millions of dollars at stake—everyone wanted to be number one. But to turn it into a catfight—Katie always thought that was just a very sexist way of looking at it.

  Despite the sniping, Gollust explains, Katie had in fact made an effort to dress modestly. “Katie was famously frugal. She was like Michelle Obama is now, with her J.Crew style of dress, although it was Banana Republic back then. She understood the importance of connecting with a regular audience. She wanted to look real—she wasn’t shopping at Chanel.”

  Through 2002 and 2003 Diane and her team capitalized on Katie’s fans’ disapproval of how Katie had grown and changed, sleekened and prospered. A new “Beat Katie” ethos emerged at GMA, according to one observer—born of the feverish workaholic girl power of Diane, Shelley, and Phyllis. “They were the triumvirate,” this person says. “That was real power, the three of them! McGrady, Ross, and Sawyer: These three women would sit at night and talk in circles about everything, forever—dissect a show again and again. They fed off each other in a brilliant and pathological way. I’d think, We’re doing a morning TV show—we’re not saving the world! Look at Matt Lauer—he does his job. You don’t have to sit all day long and say, ‘Oh, my God, that set that we did on the 7:40 segment didn’t really make sense.’”

  Diane’s middle-of-the-night reach-outs to her writers grew more intense. “EEK!” “OMG!” “ARGH,” her e-mails would girlishly begin. “This would go on forever,” the staffer says. But don’t many controlling, top-of-game media leaders behave this way? “It’s not even close—not even close. It was endless,” this person says. So, app
arently, was Diane’s holding of her highest-level staffers to supposedly impossible standards—like, some of them theorized, the standards her mother had held for her. “A title for Diane’s own book should be Less Than Perfect,” quips this person, whom Diane liked. (A producer who worked with Diane on her specials would see Mrs. Hayes drop by the studio every so often; Diane would instantly pull herself up to full height and attention. “Her mother was the boss!”)

  But the diligence paid off. That July, when first eighteen and then a remaining nine miners were trapped deep below the earth’s surface in the flooded Quecreek Mine in Pennsylvania for three days—with a harrowing and uncertain rescue attempt in play—it was GMA, not Today, that got the hero miners smiling at the seven a.m. cold open. Diane’s Kentucky roots and loyalty were her impetus to get this story, and it worked.

  Most striking was her December 2002 Primetime interview with Whitney Houston, the pop music superstar now facing rumors about drug use and eating disorders. Even though she’d agreed to the interview, she was defensive and slightly combative. If Diane had attempted this sit-down seven years earlier, her more ingratiating style—the one she’d used with Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley—would not have worked. She might have seemed cloying, even weak. But now, the relentless experience of her ten weekly hours of live Morning had taken Diane’s skill and added to it a get-to-the-point quality she hadn’t had—or needed—before. This Diane was more formidable—sympathetic, but formidable. Pointed and concerned. Minimally made-up for this interview, Diane found the right way in. You could tell she felt for Whitney when she raised the rumors of the singer’s drug use, but Diane was not cowed by Whitney’s confrontational tone. Admitting to overusing drugs and alcohol, Whitney essentially bragged that she was too rich to use a drug as lowly as crack cocaine. Diane’s sober face and pointed silence was just right for that stunning, sad remark. (The interview, disturbing when it aired, seemed tragically prescient when, ten years later, Houston died of an overdose in the bathtub of the Beverly Hilton hotel.)