The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  The senior staffer: “I like Rick, but people lived in fear of him. He would blame people for things. He would start screaming for no reason.” Still, for all his commanding machismo, Katie could—and did—overmatch him. Once, in a moment of exhausted candor, Kaplan confessed to a colleague, “‘You can’t tell Katie what to do.’”

  Now, with Rick at the helm, gone were the failed innovations. Back the show went to being a straight, conventional six-thirty news show with Katie reading the news. She was being an appropriate good soldier, but it was a waste of her personality, and she more than anyone knew it. She turned her social media into virtually a stand-alone entity. She started a monthly column, interviewing notable women, for Glamour magazine, and the editor who worked with her on it found her and her designated staff helper as cooperative as many of those CBS colleagues found them both uncollegial.

  She traveled more—the aim was to get dramatic international stories for hard news credibility and buzz. She flew to Baghdad and Damascus, “and worked very hard there,” says a foreign staffer, “and interviewed General Petraeus and the other [top brass], who fell all over themselves for her.” During her time in Afghanistan, Katie spent her off time fretting over getting just the perfect food for her father’s upcoming ninetieth birthday, for which relatives were assembling from far and wide. “Where can I get the best Southern biscuits?” she wrote her friend Pat Shifke. Pat wrote back: “I cannot believe you’re in Afghanistan—Kabul Katie—e-mailing me about the biscuits!”

  Meanwhile, Rick Kaplan had noticed something about Katie’s interview skills: “Katie is a master of follow-up questions,” he realized. “She listens really hard. If you leave her an opening, she will follow up brilliantly.” If he was to resurrect her, they’d have to find an interview subject where her perennially unexpected skill would have spectacular effect.

  • • •

  WHILE KATIE WAS going through this year-and-a-half-long roller coaster, over at ABC Diane was doing some of her strongest work—and taking the strongest control of her content. The loss of the anchor position to Charlie, the great disappointment aides say she felt when Katie, not she, became the first female solo anchor—whether or not these losses impelled her to redouble her competitiveness, those months of late 2006 through mid-2007 were hers. As Rebecca Dana put it in the New York Observer at the beginning of this period: “The big jobs—the Diane Sawyer–sized jobs—have passed by,” going, of course, to Charlie and Katie. “[B]ut the big stories are there. And Ms. Sawyer has been getting them.”

  The first change was a change in producers, which had occurred in June 2006. Ben Sherwood, with whom Diane had been dissatisfied during GMA’s previous year’s close but ultimately fruitless race with Today, left and was replaced by Jim Murphy, who had worked for Dan Rather for five years and then had created Bob Schieffer’s broadcast at Katie’s new home, CBS. Given his years with Rather, coming in to rescue a morning show may have felt like small potatoes to Murphy. “Jim didn’t care if Diane liked him or not,” says the female GMA insider who knew how upset Diane was that Katie had become the first solo anchor. “Jim told people, publicly, that he didn’t care. And I’m going to bet that’s probably true: that he really didn’t care. And that made her crazy. She goes bananas if she can’t woo you.” An associate says Diane once barked at Jim, in a wounded, angry voice: “‘You were married to Bob. You were so married to Dan! Why won’t you marry me?’”

  But it was Ben Sherwood’s leaving that would be, in the long run, more consequential than Jim Murphy’s entering. “Ben resigned suddenly when it was clear his head was on the block,” says someone who knows him well. “He is personally wealthy,” so holding on to the job wasn’t something he needed desperately to do. “He told some story about ‘important family reasons’ for returning to LA. But, really, he had to go crawling back to LA with his tail between his legs.” Meanwhile, Diane told at least one person afterward, “Ben is just so weak,” indicating that the choice to “resign” had not really been Ben’s.

  But others whom Sherwood talked to heard a different story—one that gives Sherwood more agency in the decision. “Ben told me he gave up working with Diane six months after he got [to GMA], because it was just too hard,” says one in the know. “He just wanted to get away from her. But then,” this person adds—fast-forwarding, “he spent the next five years figuring out how to get back in her good graces.”

  With her new producer, Jim Murphy, Diane racked up a series of important stories. First was her second Mel Gibson interview, in mid-October.

  Three months earlier, Gibson had been arrested while drunk driving well over the speed limit on the Pacific Coast Highway. The arrest itself was less inflammatory than Gibson’s words to the arresting officer: “Are you a Jew? The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

  Diane was her charming but tough self with Mel Gibson—and he walked into her traps. A “Gibson insider” had told Nikki Finke, herself Hollywood’s most insider journalist, that Gibson had “needed someone who’d hit him hard,” given the events of the summer. “But she was f—— harder on him than I could imagine. I was cringing. No other TV journalist would have been that hard on him.” (This was an odd comment, possibly meant for spin, because Diane’s earlier interview with Mel had had a gentility to it. He had warned her to stay away from criticizing his father, and she had acted startled. It is probable that Gibson’s people thought Diane would be easy the second time, not tough, and when their prediction backfired, they spun it thusly to Finke.)

  This was the first interview in which Gibson confessed his alcoholism, but that admission—that he had fallen off the wagon over the summer—was the easy part. He dismissed his anti-Semitic raving at the officer as the “stupid rambling of a drunkard”—the last time, he’d weakly said that anti-Semitism was a “sin.” But, importantly, he partly justified his rant as having come from the fact that the Israel-Lebanon conflict was going on; he also said that he was hurt and mad that Jewish leaders who had thought his Passion of the Christ would stir anti-Semitism had never apologized to him after the film’s release.

  Gibson said people had a “choice” whether or not to forgive him and that he felt “powerless” if they didn’t. As for his most controversial assertion made to the officer, Gibson did not take it back. Diane pushed him by saying that there was a difference between asserting, as he had to her, that the Middle East was a “tinderbox” and saying, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson gave no ground: “I think that they’re not blameless in the conflict,” he said, and a sentence or two later he repeated that statement. Gibson talked about his stunned realization that American Jews might be afraid he’d “go goose-stepping” toward them and physically attack them. Aside from subscribing to the old canard that Jews are fearful and timid, he didn’t seem to understand that fear of Hitler-like annihilation was not, in 2007 America, the fear or the issue. The fear was that such casual anti-Semitism would go unpunished. The point was that he should have apologized and he didn’t.

  Diane’s interview, which aired in GMA and nighttime portions, showed a nervous, perspiring Mel Gibson in all his grand contradictoriness: woebegone, hotheaded, defensive, startlingly clueless for a man who’d been perched for a long time at the highest levels of PR-engined Hollywood, and bizarrely selectively repentant. Few interviews with any celebrity revealed so much.

  Then Diane went to North Korea for a week. She filed reports for Good Morning America and for World News on everything from nuclear weapons to women’s sports. In that most closed of countries, she pushed past the government minders. “She kept saying, as we were driving along, ‘Can we stop, can we stop? Can we talk to that rice farmer, just for five more minutes?’” producer Margaret Aro, who accompanied her, recalls. “She was very pushy about it,” because if she’d waited for the interviewees the minders had chosen, she would have had only pat, approved answers. “She was practically hur
tling” with her translator, Margaret says, “running into a rice paddy to ask what the people thought of the U.S.”

  More foreign travel ensued: to Syria and to Iran, in the latter to conduct—in proper head scarf—her first interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When the excessive cost of all this foreign travel on the GMA coffers was raised, Diane was tough. “Man, we’re gonna really blow the budget,” a functionary worried. According to someone who was within earshot in the studio, she shot back: “Don’t you ever talk to me about money in a company that paid a hundred and ninety million dollars to an idiot to make him go away!” She was referring to Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s departure payoff to Creative Artists Agency cofounder Michael Ovitz, whom they’d briefly hired. Someone in the room laughed at this remark, agreeing that she had a point.

  Then, and on other occasions, Diane’s anger took listeners aback. One time, when a staffer opined that Diane seemed unhappy, she seethed, unconvincingly, “I am the happiest person I know!” She appeared to be in overdrive—work and more work, perfectionism and more perfectionism had always been her response, and now that she was in her early sixties, with forty full-time years in the workplace, that mode seemed to intensify, not to lessen. When someone noted that she worked too hard, she snapped that the person didn’t appreciate “my Calvinist work ethic!” It was not like her—the utterly charming and deftly self-deprecating Diane—to be snappish; perhaps she’d been criticized for this penchant of hers one too many times over one too many years for her not to be sensitive about something she now must have known that others not only marveled at but also made wisecracks about.

  The overnight workers in the newsroom were powerless when Diane would call at one a.m. with a story she’d just seen on the Drudge Report or the BBC. “Is anyone working on it?” she’d demand. When the answer was no, she’d say, “Well, send somebody out to work on it.” And, says one who knew of these events, the overnight person would “immediately start hiring freelance producers all around the world. There are some restrictions on what you can do, but she never listened to them.” And having “answered the phone at one a.m. long enough, you’d realize ABC would now have to be wasting ten thousand dollars for something that was not going to go on the air. But if you didn’t do it, and if she found out you didn’t do it, she would triple your agony for the next few weeks by calling in at one a.m. more often, wanting more stories, checking back to make sure you were working on them.”

  Word leaked out of the studio that a few staffers who were, as one of them said in earshot of a third person, “so stressed out and burned out by what she put them through” expressed their feelings to her. “Diane listened—“she teared up, she got upset.” But the complaint remained. As one put it, “That’s what it’s like working for Diane. All the time, you feel that you can’t do enough. You’ll never give enough. And you’ll just do this until you break.”

  Few on the outside knew this. What was visible, from 2006 to 2009, was a morning and newsmagazine star in her practiced prime. What had once been called her “rich, honeyed voice” had, with age, taken on an automatically emotional tear-in-the-throat quality. Her Lauren Bacall approach to the camera was now more eyes-straight-ahead, more welcomingly forthright. She expanded her franchise of social issues investigatives, which she had minted with her “modern-day Nellie Bly” pieces, as Ira Rosen had called them, at Primetime, and which she had refined on GMA. And she turned that initially feared liability for Morning—her childlessness—into a virtue: If Walter Cronkite had been America’s Uncle, Diane Sawyer was becoming America’s Aunt. Right after September 11, she had poignantly interviewed the full complement of pregnant widows from those terror attacks, and at the one-year and the five-year (and eventually the nine-year and the ten-year) anniversaries she had the widows and their growing children back on GMA, her gushing (especially at how much the children resembled their late fathers), and their bonding with her, as feel-good as it was sincere.

  Now she focused on impoverished children. She traveled home to Louisville to do a special, “Calling All Angels,” on Maryhurst, a shelter for the state’s most abused and neglected girls. Louisville was always—ever—home for her: Her mother still lived there. A local park, Tom Sawyer Park, was named after her father. She traveled to her Seneca High reunions. She received kudos and awards from her fellow Seneca alum, Louisville’s mayor (and eventually Kentucky lieutenant governor) Jerry Abramson. And she had never forgotten the lessons she and her classmates had faced during their young, improvised stumbling from segregation to integration. That even now, in the mid-aughts, such cruelty, by way of poverty, remained in Louisville was painful to Diane, and she was determined to expose it. Says Anna Robertson, who worked on the special with her: “It was heartbreaking, what these kids had to go through, getting circulated through foster care home after foster care home. Their resilience was amazing.” Diane won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for that investigation.

  Next she went to Jamaica. She interviewed an HIV-positive young woman living in poverty; when her reluctant driver hesitated to enter the most gang-ridden area of Kingston, Diane virtually threatened him: If he wouldn’t drive there, he could move over and she would take the wheel of the car.

  After that, with producer Claire Weinraub, she profiled children in destitute families in Camden, New Jersey, for a 20/20 special, “Waiting on the World to Change,” which aired in January 2007. Twice Camden had been rated America’s most dangerous city. Thirty drug arrests could take place inside Camden’s municipal borders within three hours. The city had record-high homicides and a plethora of random gunfire, burned-out lots, and abandoned buildings. It was Diane’s idea to spend the night with one of the profiled families, on a hand-me-down couch in their living room. “Diane fell asleep right away; I didn’t,” says Claire, remembering how nervous she was while Diane was relaxed. “She got up in the morning and right away started doing interviews. No makeup. It was very low-key. We shot most of it ourselves.”

  On the heels of the Camden piece, Diane pushed to do a similar special on the impoverished children of Appalachia. If Maryhurst had felt personal, this was even more so. “It was something she had wanted to do for a long, long time,” says Anna Roberston. Her parents’ stories of their own hardscrabble childhoods had made her sensitive to the pain of the region, whose problems had only deepened over the decades; central Appalachia now had three times the poverty rate of the rest of the country, the shortest life span in the nation, plus epidemic drug abuse, epic rates of cancer and depression—and record toothlessness.

  Diane and Claire followed four children and their families over the course of two years. “She was pretty indomitable about shooting from five in the morning until eleven at night,” says Claire. “At the end of one very long day she wanted to drive an hour away, way up in these winding hills in Inez, Kentucky, to visit this woman, Dinah, who we were profiling.” Dinah, an impoverished woman raising her four grandchildren, “was in choir practice at this little ramshackle church. It was called ‘the Homecoming Church.’ It was where President Johnson had declared the War on Poverty.” Once inside the church, Diane took a seat in the pew “and listened to the sermon and sang along to the hymns.” The cameraman hadn’t arrived, which didn’t seem to matter to Diane. Perhaps the Homecoming Church represented a kind of homecoming for Diane herself.

  The 20/20 special—“A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” which Jon Banner, who would become Diane’s World News executive producer, calls “one of the most disturbing hours in television I have ever seen; nobody had seen [the dire poverty it revealed] before”—generated action: editorials as well as corporate donations of medical aid. It won a Peabody Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.* After it was completed, Diane planned, with Claire, her next in the series—“A Hidden America: Children of the Plains”—about the grinding poverty of Lakota Indian children in South Dakota. She kept going on this theme, next throwing herself in
to a special about children growing up in gang-ridden Chicago. “Children of the Plains” aired in October 2011, and the Chicago piece—“Don’t Shoot, I Want to Grow Up”—aired in October 2012 and included a discussion, with members of gangs, about solutions to urban violence.

  The “cool drink of water” was now a newscaster known for her empathy. She was producing, with these specials, the same passionate, accessible sharing of stories of hardship and grit that Catherine Marshall, her America’s Junior Miss mentor, had shared by way of her 1950s bestsellers. The tagline Diane came up with for “Children of the Mountains”—“In the dark of Appalachia, sometimes the measure of strength is how much you can hold on to hope”—might have been a line from a Catherine Marshall book.

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, OVER AT CBS in the summer of 2008, Katie was enduring her workmanlike middle passage—the innovations and criticism had been stanched, but her broadcasts were undistinguished, and CBS, number three when she’d taken over, was still number three, behind Brian Williams’s number one NBC broadcast and Charlie Gibson’s ABC second place. Then some startling political news transpired. As the New York Times put it on August 29, “Senator John McCain astonished the political world on Friday by naming Sarah Palin, a little-known governor of Alaska and self-described ‘hockey mom’ with almost no foreign policy experience, as his running mate on the Republican presidential ticket.”

  Nicolle Wallace, the McCain team’s designated Palin handler, set up major network interviews for Palin. Charlie Gibson went first, in early September. Palin came off poorly prepared, her geniality only accentuating her ignorance. (When Charlie asked her what she thought of the Bush Doctrine, she asked, “In what respect, Charlie?”) But Gibson’s stern impatience and condescension was so off-putting, the Republican vice presidential nominee seemed sympathetic by comparison. McCain senior strategist Steve Schmidt felt Palin had survived the interview—it was “not an A,” he said, but neither had it inflicted “significant damage.” (That interview had, however, included Palin’s instantly infamous quote, “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”)