The News Sorority
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“Christiane was flabbergasted.” The CNN insider says that her attitude was: “‘Why aren’t I getting that time? Here’s this man—he’s an interloper—and I’ve been at the network so long!’” They tried to soothe her by saying her show would improve as Zakaria’s had improved; “it was only a matter of time.” But there were other considerations, too. While she’d been doing her specials and documentaries, others had become stars. Again, the CNN source says the sense was: “She’s an iconic figure, but, at the same time, the biggest international stories of late, where we had really distinguished ourselves—the Haiti earthquake, the first tsunami, the famine in Niger—she was at the periphery. It was Anderson Cooper. It was Sanjay Gupta. Soledad O’Brien—those were the people who were getting on the planes there. And they were doing a phenomenal job.”
Something had gone wrong. To an idealistic outsider, Christiane seemed to have a stellar career trajectory—combining network loyalty and years of unparalleled international reporting—that would have resulted in a just reward: a favored-time anchorship. By contrast, Peter Jennings’s career was an example of what could go right. He’d been an international reporter who made it into the most prestigious anchorship, at six thirty p.m., way back in 1983, a post he’d kept until slightly before his death twenty-two years later. The two were similar in many ways: Christiane instinctively preferred war reporting to desk work; so did Jennings, says one who knew him well. Christiane was thought by some at New York’s CNN to be “imperious,” and that rubbed them the wrong way. Peter Jennings was undisguisedly imperious, but that had done him no harm; in fact, his hauteur awed normally cynical male producers and intimidated seasoned female news stars. Christiane was criticized for being insufficiently sympathetic to Israel—a long-standing beef against Jennings, but one that never hurt him. Jennings’s former producer Paul Friedman says that Jennings was “a perfect mixture of all the things you need to be a successful anchor. He was knowledgeable, authoritative, credible, handsome, spoke beautifully, maintained his calm under pressure, was able to orchestrate coverage of live events unscripted. And he knew so much. He read voraciously, he took notes voraciously.” And he was invaluably connected to international leaders, especially in the Middle East. Most of those qualities could be ascribed to Christiane, who, after all, merely had her eye on a far more modest goal: the one p.m. Sunday slot on CNN.
Especially given her moderate goal, Christiane felt “dismissed”—and this, people at CNN saw, “really rankled her.” But CNN management’s tin ear toward their longtime prestige reporter left an opening for other suitors. What CNN’s executives may have been too cavalier or literal-minded about, Christiane’s friends Willow Bay and Bob Iger were reverential toward. CNN’s insults to Christiane became a great opportunity for ABC to make a bold hire.
In March came a blast of media-world news: Christiane was hired away from CNN to host ABC’s This Week, taking over from Stephanopoulos. Her choice as the host of a show that was overwhelmingly national rather than international was widely termed “surprising.” She would be the first woman ever to solo anchor any of the major network Sunday morning talk shows, with the fascinating exception of the person who invented the genre, little-known broadcast pioneer Martha Rountree, who turned radio’s The American Mercury, which she had created, into TV’s Meet the Press in the medium’s infancy: 1947.
Christiane would be the first female solo of a Sunday morning news roundup show in sixty-three years.
When CNN staffers heard that Christiane would be leaving, they were, one says, bereft. As for the sense among the executives, the management insider says: “ABC really wanted her. It was a big risk, but she believes in herself in a big way. And to her credit, she said, ‘You know, I’m gonna take a chance.’” Management “totally understood [and] didn’t want to get into a pitched battle over salaries.” It wasn’t quite “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” but it certainly sounded as if they weren’t willing to fight for her.
In contrast to CNN’s permissive if blasé attitude, Christiane herself was very emotional about leaving CNN. A beat after the news went public, Christiane wrote this poignant private e-mail to her colleagues:
To My Family at CNN,
I am stunned and humbled by all your words and thoughts and good wishes. I have been bobbing on a tide of poignancy, enveloped in the amazing outpouring of love and affection from my friends and family at the place I call home.
For nearly 27 years it has not just been a privilege but an unparalleled pleasure . . . a great, rollicking, earth-shaking, world-shaping adventure . . . to be part of CNN, which is not just a company but an institution that has changed the very way we live. From the beginning the excitement was overwhelming as Ted Turner strode around declaring, “I WAS CABLE BEFORE CABLE WAS COOL.”
And then boldly exhorted the establishment arrayed against him to “Lead, follow or get out of the way.” He led, we followed and the rest had to get out of the way!
From being shut out of the first White House stake-outs 30 years ago to the barely met payrolls, CNN and all of us, the army of true believers, did what no one ever imagined one organization could do, pioneering, transformative, indispensable to this day.
From the very first day I walked into the newsroom at Techwood, September 1983, I have been proud to climb the ladder CNN put in front of me, every hard-won step of the way. Not just proud, but thrilled to bits. I feel truly fortunate to belong to the most supportive, amazing, dedicated and inspiring people from the leadership to my colleagues in every corner of the company.
I never get tired of recalling the heart-stopping events we have all covered and brought to the world, from the Wall coming down, to the first Gulf War.
She wrote movingly of how she’d found her calling—and the depths of colleagueship in Bosnia, where she’d learned to
never never wav[er] from the mission: to report the truth, no matter how difficult and dangerous; to be the eyes and ears of our viewers in the United States and around the world, to tell people’s stories and be a constructive and positive force in society, a force that tries to make a difference.
That’s what CNN is, that is what I am so proud to have been part of, proud to have helped shape. And happy to have had so much fun all along the way.
That’s the mission I have been trying to continue with my phenomenal team at our eponymously named program here. So why am I leaving? In my heart I am not. This has been the most difficult of decisions. I am simply taking the next challenging and difficult but exciting step. I believe more than anything that knowledge and familiarity with important international news and events abroad are fundamental to Americans today. This rare chance to take international news to a broader base here in the United States is one that I felt I could not turn down. I will take everything I have learned, and loved, here at CNN and put it into action!
And the network I love will have you, your hard work, your heart, your vision and your faith. Keep doing CNN’s important work, without which the world would most definitely be a poorer place. Never forget who you are. Never forget what CNN is. Never forget how we all together changed the world.
From the bottom of my heart I thank you all, and I say only “au revoir,” not goodbye,
Christiane
And so by the beginning of autumn 2010, two of the three solo evening anchors were women, and one of the three Sunday morning solo hosts was a woman. That was three out of six when, five years earlier, there had been none.
Richard Wald, who’d watched all the changes over the decades, thought Brian Williams—the now minority male at six thirty—“had a great line” he used when he talked about his profession to credulous young students and cheerlead them past ambition-stanching stereotypes in the process. Patronizingly exaggerated though it may have been, Williams had said “I want to tell schoolchildren, ‘You don’t have to be a girl to be an anchor.’”
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The early reviews were polarized. Alessandra Stanley, who had earlier evinced almost gleeful ridicule for Katie and mild contempt for Diane, approved of Christiane’s “panache and a no-nonsense briskness,” and termed it refreshingly welcome in this more genial, schmoozy context. In her New York Times review titled “A TV Host Challenges a Guest. That’s News,” Stanley applauded Christiane for holding up the discomfiting Time magazine cover of Bibi Aisha, the young Afghan woman whose nose and ears had been cut off by her husband, while sharply demanding of guest Leader of the House Nancy Pelosi, “Is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan?” This was Christiane throwing out her global feminist red meat. This was also Christiane treating Pelosi with the same scolding bravado she’d so effectively (and name-makingly) visited on Bill Clinton over Bosnia. Stanley noted Pelosi’s being “startled” and giving “fractured, politic answers” to the new host’s defiant challenge. And, citing the conventional wisdom purveyors’ “surprise” and “negative” reactions to internationalist Christiane’s selection for This Week, Stanley saluted her freshness and intelligence. “Ms. Amanpour is not an election expert and hasn’t spent her life covering Washington politics, but she is smarter than many of those who have,” Stanley declared, with comradely defiance.
On the opposite end of the opinion spectrum, the Washington Post’s Tom Shales seized on Christiane’s deficits with a sarcastic vengeance. Calling her “The Grand Duchess Amanpour from her Royal Barge Overseas” and describing aspects of her debut show as “ludicrous,” he assayed: “With pomp and panoply befitting a visit from a foreign dignitary, ABC raised the curtain on its newly revamped This Week program and introduced in a big way the superstar . . . Christiane Amanpour, veteran CNN foreign correspondent now uneasily relocated to a desk job.” He called her “miscast” for the role, her “highly touted global orientation coming across as inappropriate and contrived” on a longtime domestic-issues show.
The media gossips also took shots. Christiane, just yesterday an above-it-all global heroine, became fodder for the Beltway natterers. The New York Post wrote: “The knives are out for Christiane Amanpour at ABC News’ D.C. bureau. Since the ex-CNN war correspondent began anchoring This Week in August, she’s upset some co-workers by being a ‘distant outsider,’” sources said. Anonymous sources ripped into her for her aloofness: “It’s not like other war zones that you can parachute into. She is very cold and distant with the other bureau staff.” Others complained about her lack of experience covering U.S. politics.
Christiane’s shows seemed to oscillate according to her strengths and weaknesses. The controversy surrounding the proposed construction of an Islamic community center very near the site of the destroyed World Trade Center—the Ground Zero Mosque, as the project was called—afforded her the chance to present, in early October, as close to a healthy fight as one ever sees on TV. With nine guests—from conservative Christians to a conservative imam, to an Iranian intellectual who fled the Ayatollah and a young Muslim-turned-Christian-turned-Muslim scholar, to an American anti-Islamist, to two parents of 9/11 victims with two different positions, to the liberal imam sponsoring the mosque and his wife, an American Muslim feminist—Christiane confidently rode herd over the frankest town hall imaginable, and one in which, even though things got emotional, every speaker had a valid argument. Right-wing Web sites, which had had it in for Christiane for years, called the program biased, but it was bracingly multisided, genuinely thought-provoking, and strikingly cosmopolitan. Only she could have curated such a palate of speakers and moderated it aggressively and deftly to its Emmy-nominated acuity.
On the other hand, Christiane’s January 2011 show after Gabrielle Giffords was shot displayed her at a disadvantage. Though her interview with the eyewitness intern Daniel Hernandez was strong, gathering together and chatting with other, secondary witnesses showed that transplanted Morning was not her métier. She tried too hard. She wasn’t natural. Without intending to, she sounded too high-toned to have what was essentially a space-filling, bread-and-butter human interest conversation with regular Joe and Jane residents of the mall-strewn American Southwest.
Eventually Rick Kaplan was called over from CBS to ABC to save This Week with Christiane Amanpour. Kaplan, of course, had EP’d for Diane at Primetime, and then he’d been called in to save Katie’s CBS broadcast. With Kaplan’s rehiring at ABC, some women producers privately—angrily—marveled that hot-tempered executive producers like Kaplan and similarly ever employed David Doss (neither man was shy about screaming at staff) continued to get reemployed, whereas the talented Shelley Ross, who had boosted GMA’s numbers to near parity with Today, had been doggedly implied as “difficult” in Page Six items.
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AS FOR THE GABRIELLE GIFFORDS STORY, it would be Diane who came to “own” it, interviewing the recovering hero congresswoman and her astronaut husband Mark Kelly with animated, empathetic ease. Later that year, World News with Diane Sawyer kicked off a series, “Made in America.” Correspondents went out into the heartland, finding factories and companies that were creating jobs. For two holiday seasons in a row—2011 and 2012—Diane and her correspondents launched a campaign: If every American spent just sixty-four dollars more on items with the “Made in America” label, Diane told her viewers, two hundred thousand new jobs could be created in the United States. Producers at other networks weren’t sure if this was sweet-spot hitting for a financially depressed America—or if it was jingoistic. Viewers liked it, and they liked Diane, who gave up little of her glamour to be the purveyor of both hard news and empowering service. But still she lagged behind Brian Williams. And Katie lagged behind both of them.
It was hard not to think that Brian Williams’s being a man—and the hand-picked Brokaw heir (both all-American, handsome, genial)—had something to do with his abiding fortune, ever since he assumed the NBC anchor chair in December 2004. Williams was a consummate pro, to be sure. And, yes, he was self-assured and very likable. And his coverage of Hurricane Katrina had won him and his team a Peabody Award. But his tone was slightly unctuous. Those who felt Diane was too creamy would—if they were being honest—have a hard time disputing that Williams was close to a male equivalent. Like Katie, Brian Williams was “real.” He goofed around. With NBC’s blessing, and help, he had cultivated an entertainment persona (Katie had cultivated hers on her own), by way of not only comic stints on Tina Fey’s TV-news-spoofing sitcom 30 Rock but also guestings on Leno and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Yet people didn’t criticize him for that, as they had criticized Katie.
Furthermore, Williams’s résumé was significantly lighter than Diane’s years of serious social justice investigatives and her enormous bank of international leader interviews, and it was lighter than Katie’s output as well. And, unlike Katie, with her overseas work as a Pentagon correspondent in Kuwait, Williams had not had international experience before he started to be groomed by NBC to become Brokaw’s heir in the mid-1990s. In fact, both Katie and Diane had had longer runs on national TV than Williams had. He had spent midcareer time at local Fox, CBS, and NBC affiliates (in D.C., New Jersey, Philadelphia). Nothing wrong with that, of course. But in the high-barred world of highest-level network TV news, it’s not a distinguished career arc. Nor had Brian Williams ever been in the thick of war, unlike Christiane, who chose to throw herself into the dangerous mix of many international conflicts.
Still, in 2010, Jon Friedman, the well-regarded media columnist for MarketWatch.com, called Brian Williams the new Walter Cronkite. Friedman explains, “He has the appeal and gravitas in this century as Cronkite had
in the last one,” adding that “viewers trust Brian more than any other current anchor, just as people did with Cronkite. The viewers”—judging by the ratings—“clearly respect him. And they like his air of informality,” something, apparently, a handsome, confident, high-suburban white male can pull off in network news—even if Katie, with her nightly “Hi,” couldn’t.
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AT THIS SAME TIME that Williams was consolidated well in front of Diane and Katie, Christiane made an effort to wade into the conversation about American politics, not always successfully. Her This Week lagged behind David Gregory’s Meet the Press and Bob Schieffer’s Face the Nation in the same way that an international show hosted by either of those seasoned, jousting national news relishers would have lagged behind the show Christiane had just left at CNN. This Week with Christiane Amanpour “just didn’t fly—it was too big a political year,” reasons Kathy O’Hearn. “An anchor is not Christiane’s natural habitat,” Bella Pollen adds. “She’s a field reporter—and if they were smarter, they’d send her out more.”
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MEANWHILE, KATIE’S POOR viewership numbers weren’t moving. By late fall 2010, CBS News was buzzing with gossip that Katie had finally pushed too hard against her prime champion, Moonves. Says the CBS man, “She was trying to pressure Les to put [a two-year extension of her contract] on the table.” Katie was a great communicator. She lived out loud. Whether or not the two-year extension from CBS was real or mere media bait, the sense within CBS was that Moonves felt she had gone too far in putting that out to the media.
Still, as 2010 turned to 2011, intranetwork politics—as well as national news—was dwarfed by cataclysmic world events. The year 2011 started with massive anti–Hosni Mubarak protests in Cairo. All three women—Katie, Diane, and especially Christiane—were involved in the coverage. But another female journalist was to bear the horrific brunt of a terrible object lesson: what could happen to women reporting crises in anti-Western countries.