The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  When Katie got her shot at Palin two weeks later, the chemistry was different. In gender, age, and—handy, shopworn—image, the two seemed more evenly matched. In fact, Palin later claimed, on Oprah, that she’d understood that the interview “was supposed to be kind of lighthearted, fun, working mom speaking with working mom and the challenges that we have with teenage daughters.” Well, Palin was wrong. First, Katie, and Rick Kaplan, saw this as a potential game-changer for the show, a chance to remind everyone of Katie’s interviewing acuity and persistence. Second, “Katie thought Palin was such a fake,” says a CBS producer who talked with her about the experience afterward. “Katie thought she had really seen through her” during the interviews, which began as a walk-and-talk near the UN and then continued in a studio sit-down. Mainly, Katie was palpably knowledgeable, and never had her talent for unexpected fastballs been so effectively parlayed.

  The interview was broadcast in three parts over three nights: first on the economic crisis (Lehman Brothers had just declared bankruptcy), on international affairs the next night, and finally on domestic and social issues. In the first portion, Palin struggled to hold her own against Katie’s calm, relentless challenges. Despite what Palin said, polls showed that most Americans were looking to Obama, not McCain, to solve the economic crisis; would Palin support a moratorium on foreclosures? Couric asked. When faced with a question about the proposed $700 billion stimulus plan, Palin’s answer was so incoherent, a Newsweek columnist described it as “a vapid emptying out of every catchphrase about economics that came into her head.” And when Katie asked Palin when, in McCain’s twenty-six years in Congress, he had ever been in favor of government regulation, the stumped Alaska governor sarcastically offered to find some examples later, “and get them to ya.”

  The foreign policy segment was worse. Palin muddled her generalized and uninformed responses, lost her composure (she would later say she just wanted Couric to “go away”), and, most memorably, when Katie asked her, and re-asked her, and re-re-asked her, what newspapers she read, Palin could not name a single periodical. One writer put it this way: “Katie peeled Sarah Palin like a raw carrot.” It was on the basis of this interview that the Obama campaign began, as campaign manager David Plouffe put it, “to see in our research not merely a cooling off in terms of people’s views of Palin but downright concern about her qualification.”

  It was in the third segment, on domestic issues, that Couric showed her feminism straight up. But she also showed partisanship. It could be argued that she pushed Palin past Palin’s own avowed generalized feminism—“I’m a feminist who believes in equal rights . . . I’m absolutely for equal pay for equal work. . . . It’s obvious there are some double standards here,” Palin said—into a place where there was little room for Palin’s points of view. For example, Katie prodded Palin on the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which indeed dealt directly with fair pay for women, although Palin, like almost all conservatives, opposed it strongly. Then Katie questioned Palin on abortion and contraception. Palin said she was not opposed to contraception, and that she would never punish a woman for having an abortion. But when Couric pushed her to take a stand on whether a fifteen-year-old who had been raped by her own father would be entitled to an abortion, Palin responded that she would always counsel to “choose life.” (Hard-right abortion opponents oppose incest exceptions, and Palin’s use of the word “choose” was tellingly moderate.) Katie pressed Palin on homosexuality, and Palin went out of her way to say, “One of my absolute best friends for the last thirty years, and I love her dearly, happens to be gay,” pointedly sneering at tokenism by adding, with likable emphasis, “And she is not my ‘gay friend.’” Yet she termed homosexuality a “choice” rather than an orientation. Katie pushed Palin to explain her Wasilla church’s harsh view on gays, and Palin distanced herself from an egregious antigay event at the church. But, troublingly, Palin, while declaring respect for science, said evolution should be a subject for “debating” in schools. She also couldn’t identify a single Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed.

  Was Katie using Democratic criteria to question—even vet—Palin? It could be argued that she was. Was there a “gotcha” element to this portion of the interview? For conservatives: almost certainly. Did she nevertheless help to pinpoint those beliefs of Palin’s—on homosexuality and creationism, and possibly, though less clearly, on abortion in cases of rape and incest—that were beyond the pale of even center-right Republicans? Also: yes.

  Katie’s interviews with Palin were considered highly revelatory, and they proved to be a sharp—negative—turning point for voters’ perceptions of Palin’s qualifications. For the interviews, Katie was awarded, in March 2009, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism from USC’s Annenberg School. The judges termed Katie’s Sarah Palin interviews “a defining moment in the 2008 presidential campaign.” Given all the pearl clutching that had taken place in high-toned journalistic circles over Miss Morning’s ascent to the Great Man’s chair, what better literal validation was there than the Cronkite Award? A friend of Katie’s from NBC says: “Sarah Palin vindicated Katie. So many times” in the previous two years “people had said, ‘Oh, Katie’s out.’” Now, she finally wasn’t. As well, Sean McManus’s much-whispered-about failure during those first seven months of Katie’s tenure evaporated as he proudly, if opportunistically, announced, “We congratulate Katie. . . . [Her] journalistic achievements are unique, unmistakably her own, and in keeping with the highest tradition of Walter Cronkite and CBS News excellence.”

  A month before the award ceremony, Katie had gotten her game back in a different way, in an exclusive interview with America’s hero of the moment, US Airways pilot Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III—known to the world as just “Sully.” On January 15, Sully had safely, brilliantly landed a commercial plane on the Hudson River right off Manhattan after a flock of geese had jammed the plane’s engines following takeoff. The media became consumed by Sully rapture, and the Sully mania—making a hero of a gracious, older white male saving a plane full of travelers—was even, in its way, a peace flag to a badly divided country. Katie returned to her early Today show self to engage with the pilot warmly but not gushily.

  Yet despite the validation from her journalistic peers and the display of her unique skills, some noticed an apparent melancholy in Katie. One female staffer noticed that “it seemed important to her that she had a boyfriend”—the handsome Perlin. “We were walking down to the sports control room” one day and she blurted out, in a complete non sequitur, “‘I have a boyfriend, you know!’” The staffer thought Katie said that to signal her own invulnerability, but of course it only had the opposite effect. Her older daughter, Ellie, was away in college now; Carrie was a high school girl, separating from her mother as all girls do. The tight bond they’d had since Jay’s death—it had always been “me and my girls”—was now loosening. “It can be lonely,” she admitted to a magazine.

  At the end of May, Katie gave the commencement address at Princeton, and it was delightfully Katie in her truest, smart-feminist form. It turns out she was the first woman to ever give the address, a fact she nudged the school about: “All these years, and only one woman?” she asked the fellow cap-and-gowned assembly. And “you actually asked [actor] Bradley Whitford of The West Wing before you had a woman? I understand the concept of casting a wide net, but great women like Madeleine Albright, Sally Ride, Mother Teresa, Ellen DeGeneres—all bested by a fake political adviser to a fake president? And then you had Stephen Colbert, a fake TV anchor? Actually, Stephen could be a real anchor . . . with just a little more product in his hair.”

  In September, Katie obtained an interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just before he addressed the UN, in which she used an ambush style she’d honed early in her career. Of the Holocaust, “you have called it a lie,” Katie said to the pock-faced leader. “And I’m just curious”—the sarcasm was pure Katie—“I have som
e photos, dead bodies from a German concentration camp taken by the Associated Press, Mr. President.” She brandished the image, caught by the cameras. “Is this photo a lie?” The Iranian president then asked her why this “particular” historical event among many was “so important to you.” She said, “Because you’re denying it happened.” Instead of simply dodging her questions, he foolishly let himself be piqued by Katie’s aggressiveness in brandishing the photos. “In World War II, sixty million people were killed,” Ahmadinejad retorted. “Why are we just focusing on this special group alone?” He had fallen into her trap. With that provocative, extraneous comment, he was highlighting his anti-Jewish feelings and his suspicion that any U.S. reporter was promoting Israel’s cause. Katie had used what was by now an old trick of hers on a new target: She had pulled a striking new confirmation of unsurprising sentiments out of a major troublesome world leader, yielding a newsworthy sound bite.

  Her talent was beginning to show in her new anchor post. Too bad plans were now being secretly made to scuttle her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Two Out of Three and Then Three Out of Six

  Diane, Katie, and Christiane: 2008 to 2011

  ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2009, the TV industry and the world of media women were jostled with another bit of momentous news: Charlie Gibson announced that he would retire, in three and a half months, from his anchor duties at ABC World News. It was finally time for Diane to take over as anchor. Two women anchors, where just three years earlier there had never even been one! The New York Times aptly headlined its story “At ABC, an Anchor Shift; for TV, an Image Shift,” with TV reporters Bill Carter and Brian Stelter cautioning that the somewhat revolutionary news that “two of the three main network anchors will be female” was qualified by the fact that being a woman anchor “in the past has punished others, like Barbara Walters and Connie Chung.”

  In a sly aside, Carter and Stelter called Diane “the longtime—some would say long-suffering” host of GMA. Over at the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz wrote a story with a lead (almost undoubtedly given to him by Diane’s camp) that made Diane sound like she was looking out for her colleague’s interests. “When Diane Sawyer was approached last Thursday about taking over for Charlie Gibson as ABC’s evening news anchor,” Kurtz authoritatively wrote, “her first words were about her friend and former broadcast partner: ‘Can’t we talk Charlie into staying?’ Sawyer asked ABC News President David Westin.” Kurtz reported that it was “only after Westin assured her that he had tried and failed to persuade . . . Gibson not to retire” that Diane agreed to take the anchor post.

  Behind the momentous news was a bit more drama than was evident—and behind the media-fed story of Diane’s concern and generosity things had gone rather differently.

  Charlie Gibson’s resignation e-mail to his World News colleagues and staff was strikingly emotional, even pained. He wrote: “It has not been an easy decision to make. This has been my professional home for thirty-five years and I love this news department, to the depths of my soul.” David Westin then sent his own e-mail, crisply saying what hardly needed to be said: “Diane Sawyer is the right person to succeed Charlie and build on what he has accomplished. She has an outstanding and varied career in television journalism, beginning with her role as a State Department correspondent and continuing at 60 Minutes, Primetime Live, and Good Morning America.” Jon Banner, who would become her executive producer, puts it this way: “When Charlie retired, it was sort of a natural for Diane to come over. There was nobody who was more qualified to step into that chair, and in some cases she was probably more qualified years beforehand.”

  Exactly. She had been qualified “years beforehand,” and Charlie’s e-mail’s high emotion might have betrayed something: an involuntary aspect of his resignation. As for Westin, as one insider says (as others also have), “Diane controlled Westin. She had a grasp over him. A lot of people felt that, in the final years” of his news division presidency, their relationship had been strained after she did “not get the job after Peter left.” He had been indebted to her—she had championed him for president during the rocky patch that had included his extramarital affair. Some presumed he now felt bad that the effort to hand the anchor reins to her had been botched and that Charlie had gotten the anchorship instead.

  Here is what the ABC insider says really happened, rather than Charlie resigning: “In the summer of 2009 Charlie had lost his momentum and Diane moved in for the kill.” The person says this account came from Charlie himself. “Charlie told people that he was called into David’s office and told, ‘You’re out.’ I don’t know what language Diane used to pull that off.”

  • • •

  DIANE AND KATIE were different enough, temperamentally and in work ethic and reputation, that caution did not have to be taken by Diane for her to not repeat the errors of the Katie rollout—an excessive good-bye week at the morning show, too much advance promotion of the new anchorship, touting of her salary, a radically experimental and personality-tailored news broadcast. Still, the lessons of Katie’s disastrous first six months at least served as a consolation prize for the fact that Diane was the second, not the first, female anchor. And, yes, the gender issue was unavoidably there in the minds of the press and the network publicists—and the public. If a man succeeded Charlie, there wouldn’t have been such acute comparison; when there are so few women at the top, the distinctions become more powerful.

  Diane’s transition from Morning to six thirty would be concertedly business as usual, a reflection not only of her caution and fine-tuned sense of strategy but also of what ABC had learned from Katie’s overhyped transition. “Besides,” as an NBC producer who watched both launches closely says, “Diane is older and more respectful—and from the South. She knows how to ease her way into your living room. Katie has a more feisty, sly, jokey, winking-at-you persona. Katie’s not soft. And Diane’s salary”—about $14 million when she started (estimated at $17 million by 2012)—“was never talked about, if you noticed. She wanted it that way.”

  Still, personality cues were sprinkled about, like tasteful favors at a low-key party. Diane’s farewell show on Good Morning America, in mid-December 2009, featured Robin Roberts almost tearfully saying, “I’ll miss my Louise,” referencing her and Diane as the do-or-die gal twosome in Thelma & Louise; some golden oldie moments of Diane tumbling into full-bore Morning (the chimp on her back, for example); and a multi-hanky surprise appearance by the 9/11 widows and their children. Thus Diane left Good Morning America as the person she had become on that show: the encouraging female relative, the “aspirational” lady who—surprise!—really did let her hair down. (The private send-off party was more sophisticated: In the gag reel, ABC’s investigative reporter Brian Ross was made up to portray Mike Nichols, and he was locked in a furtive embrace with Katie. Says an ABC staffer: In the original gag reel “we [filmed] Mike [himself] kissing Katie. Mike agreed to do it as a joke. But that version got nixed,” and the Brian Ross–as–Mike-with-Katie scene was substituted. It isn’t clear on whose say-so the scene was nixed. However, the staffer adds, suggesting that it might have been Diane who demurred, “Katie takes risks and Diane doesn’t.”)

  • • •

  DIANE ENTERED ABC World News as the serious, hard news workaholic and as the earnest Methodist who’d transformed into a social issues reporter.

  The tough reporter part of her was reflected in her second interview with President Ahmadinejad, conducted in Copenhagen in December 2009, three months after Katie had done her own interview with him. Diane sped to the Denmark-bound plane right after she hugged the last GMA staffer good-bye; she was not messing around, not putting any daylight between her departure from one gig and ascent to another. She was to grill the Iranian leader on his nuclear program, and there was showcase-potential competition among female interviewers with Ahmadinejad, whose imperviousness to the conventions of Western-media politesse had made as his statements as easy
to mock his button-shouldered, short-sleeved khaki shirts. Christiane had had the first, and most penetrating, interviews with him, and Katie’s baiting of him over the Holocaust pictures had been effective theater. Diane made “precision” of preparation the name of her game with him, says Margaret Aro: Just before sitting down for the interview, to clear up a tiny research inconsistency that no one else on her staff had noticed, Diane insisted on getting on the phone with Mohammed El-Baradei, then the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

  Diane confronted Ahmadinejad with the United States’s recently obtained documents about Iran’s nuclear plans—she waved them at him, just as Katie had waved the Holocaust photos. He angrily dismissed them as having been “fabricated” by America. She also took him firmly to task for detaining three young American hikers—two young men and one young woman—who had gotten lost and accidentally ended up inside the Iranian border. Diane’s tone made it clear that she felt it was preposterous that the hikers could be spies. Ahmadinejad’s calm assertion that they could be spies drove home to viewers the intransigence that the American public had come to identify with him. (The female hiker was released after over four hundred days; the men would end up spending almost eight hundred days behind bars.) It was a take-no-prisoners interview, and Diane premiered it during her first week as World News anchor, laying down the gauntlet: She would be a strong, world-traveling reporter-anchor.