The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Several speakers said that Jeff Zucker’s departure had left an understandable gap, with staff confusion and staff cuts. It was widely—and credibly—rumored that Katie was very unhappy with the lower-end stories. The woman who had spent her life triumphing over those who’d underestimated her intelligence and her seriousness could not have been happy with the silly shows, which undercut, within months, a hard-earned reputation she had taken years constructing.

  Perhaps most damningly, another site, that of Perez Hilton—a kind of Elton John of Hollywood gossips—quoted an ABC source as saying that the show was “an unmitigated disaster” and that Katie was “dreadfully boring.” She’d been the opposite of boring—she’d been a rocket that lit up morning TV—during the first half of her tenure at Today. But that had been nearly two decades ago. It takes effort to figure out what’s wrong with a show that hits the doldrums, and it takes commitment to fix it. According to someone in the know, it seemed that Katie didn’t want to put in that effort. Meanwhile, ABC president Anne Sweeney was said to be unhappy and disappointed over the failure of Katie’s show, because she was the one who’d wooed her. Furthermore, the affiliates were “furious,” the insider says, “because they could have had Queen Latifah or someone else instead of Katie.”

  Rumors circulated that Katie would join Jeff at CNN—she denied them—and that she would take Barbara Walters’s place on The View—she denied those, too. An unusual (and unfair) splash of subsequent dissing came her way by people in a less, and then far less, exalted perch from which to criticize her than, say, Sam Zelman at CNN had been. “Is she a legitimate journalist? She used to be on the Today show,” said Jennifer Aniston—ironically, an actress with the same career longevity as Katie, the same durable, sometimes frustrating (but very well-utilized) girl-next-door image, and the same undersung versatility, the ability to rotate between popular and serious roles. But perhaps the lowest blow came in August when Kim Kardashian, at one of the rare points in her dubious but enormous notoriety when she was actually sympathetic: when she’d just had her baby, North West—blasted Katie for hypocrisy. Katie had sent Kim a baby gift, a not unwise gesture for any afternoon talk show host. But shortly thereafter, in an uncharacteristic lapse, she’d apparently told a reporter for the supermarket magazine In Touch Weekly, “I don’t understand—why are [the Kardashians] so famous?” This was clearly a question that much of America had asked, but Kim seized on it. She tweeted: #HateFakeMediaFriends and #MayIHumblySuggestYouNot SendGiftsThenTalkShit.

  Katie Couric apologized to Kim Kardashian. In fairness, any interviewer in popular media would be well served to not make an enemy of this woman who, like it or loathe it, guaranteed crowds, press, and ratings. Still, the apology seemed a humiliating fillip at a humiliating moment for the woman who had been the first solo anchor. It was easy to fall far fast.

  A week after the scold from Kim Kardashian, Katie did what turned out to be the smartest thing she could do, days away from the debut of her second season of Katie: She got engaged. Not that it was insincere—she and John Molner were in love, her friends were delighted for her, she had been a widow and single mother for over fifteen years. Not that it wasn’t perfectly and responsibly timed for the whole mom-and-daughters family: Ellie had graduated from college, Carrie was about to leave home to start college, they would be happy to know that old mom would be taken care of. The first day of her second season, Molner appeared onstage with a bouquet of flowers for Katie. The women in the audience were appropriately thrilled. Two days later, Katie did a split-the-difference show—dethroned reality mom Kate Gosselin in the first half as low-bar bait; then Julianne Moore as a snarer of the secret-daytime-TV-watching elites.

  • • •

  AS FOR CHRISTIANE, she remained in fighting, idealistic character, instinctively repeating the personal memes that had pushed her to prominence and admiration as a conscience among journalists. During September 2013’s heated debate over Syria, when much of the country, and President Obama’s own party, was at the least leery of intervention, Christiane’s passion about the simple moral need to intervene in a case when a dictator was using chemical weapons against his own people was singular. She was as dramatic as anyone had seen her in many years—since Bosnia, since Rwanda, since Darfur.

  On a televised panel with liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow, strident blogger Andrew Sullivan, and Newsweek’s Paris chief and Middle East regional editor Christopher Dickey, Christiane said: “I can barely contain myself at this point. How many more times do we have to say: Weapons of mass destruction cannot be used. And as bad as it is to decapitate somebody, it is by no means equal. We can’t use this false moral equivalence about what’s going on right now. They tried to do it in the Second World War. They tried to do it in Bosnia. They tried to do it in Rwanda and they’re trying to do it now. There is no moral equivalence.”

  When Blow and Sullivan tried to cut her off, she angrily insisted that she be heard out. “Wait just a second!” she thundered. “The president of the United States and the most moral country in the world based on the most moral principles in the world—at least that’s the fundamental principle that the United States rests on—cannot allow this to go unchecked, cannot allow this to go unchecked!”

  It was as if all her years covering atrocities—atrocities tucked away behind the American political news and the tabloid news, atrocities Americans didn’t know about in places that didn’t “matter,” atrocities her friends had died reporting and photographing—it was as if all those sights and sounds, injustices and life lessons came flooding back to her now, filling her with an urgent desire to scream out to America, once again, how important it was not to ignore them. Then she added, “Fifteen, sixteen years later, President Clinton is still apologizing for Rwanda.”

  Something was jarring—even offensive—about this televised exchange, and that was Andrew Sullivan’s attitude. When Christiane heatedly spoke of what she perceived as America’s obligation to the people of Syria, Sullivan—a blogger who probably had never dodged sniper fire—patronizingly soothed and chastised her. “Stop being emotional!” he ordered. “It’s not emotion,” she responded. “It’s not emotion! We have turned our eyes away from the most terrible crimes! It’s not emotion!” The exchange was a reminder that women who report serious news still face double-standard knee-jerk complaints about maintaining “manly” calm and objectivity in the newsroom.

  Later, Christiane tweeted an explanation for her outburst: “My passion based on justice and the moral imperative & indeed America’s proud history of now-forgotten humanitarian intervention.” The phrase “now-forgotten” leaps out. It is wistful. Wistful about the era she pioneered; wistful, perhaps, about her own stellar accomplishments.

  One particularly important accomplishment occurred five days after that heated conversation about Syria. On September 7, Christiane scored an interview with the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, who’d been sworn in in June. After she, Katie, and Diane had all had at the punching bag that was Ahmadinejad, each skillfully and differently revealing his anti-Westernness, pie-eyed zealotry, and woeful anti-Semitism, there was a new leader, and Christiane, fittingly, got him first.

  In the interview, Rouhani’s first English-language televised message to the United States, the Iranian president offered not only “peace and friendship from Iranians to Americans,” he also made clear that he wanted to negotiate with the West (with the approval of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei). Most significantly, at the end of the interview—in polar opposition to the years of his predecessor’s Holocaust denial—the new president said: “I have said before that I am not an historian, and that when it comes to speaking of the dimension of the Holocaust, it is historians that should reflect on it. But in general I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis committed towards the Jews, as well as non-Jewish people, was reprehensible and
condemnable as far as we are concerned.”

  Christiane proudly touted the scoop on Twitter and Facebook. At last, here was sweet exoneration for her beloved native country.

  Just before Christmas 2013, Katie received an unattractive holiday present: Her show was being canceled (effective after the June 2014 conclusion of its current season). She subsequently announced that news and said she would be leaving the network. Disney/ABC and Katie both declared it a mutual decision, which most people read as a tactful way of saying that ABC had dumped Katie after difficulties with the show that, indeed, she herself had been unhappy with. The joint statement read: “We’re very proud of everyone’s contributions to making Katie the number one new syndicated talk show of 2012–2013, and we look forward to the rest of the season.” Katie did have someplace to go: She would become the chief global news correspondent for Yahoo News—albeit at a considerable decrease in salary. But it was hard to miss the fact that Katie was leaving her third major network in seven years. Still, there was another way of looking at it: She had tried every format—Morning, Evening anchor, Daytime. She’d done the grand rounds of national TV—of Old Media—briskly and thoroughly (if not always successfully), as few other broadcast stars ever had. Was it not time for her to finally move to New Media, which she’d been toying with for longer than her peers had?

  Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced: “Katie’s depth of experience, her intellectual curiosity and her charisma made her the perfect choice to anchor Yahoo News and the whole Yahoo Network.” Which brought up something else: the uncanny match between fifty-six-year-old Couric and thirty-eight-year-old Mayer. Couric was a relatable and controversial woman who had gleefully pushed the envelope in a way that had provoked needed conversation about why powerful women in serious business were so criticized for their personal lives, their clothes, their incomes, their beaux, their karaoke singing, their six-thirty on-air “Hi,” their choice in magazines.

  In taking over that conversation, Mayer was advancing the provocation in a manner commensurate with the times. Every bit as much a boat rocker as Katie, Mayer had thrown herself and her bridegroom, venture capitalist Zachary Bogue, an unusually ostentatious two-day wedding. She customarily dressed in foxier designer clothes than those worn by most businesswomen. Tapped to lead Yahoo when she was newly pregnant, Mayer had immediately announced she would be taking a very short maternity leave and would be working all the way through it. Then, once she returned to the Yahoo campus with her newborn and baby nurse installed in a suite she paid for herself, she demanded that those Yahoo employees who were specifically innovation tasked not telecommute but, rather, had to be on campus daily. (The mommy blogs and opinion Web sites exploded: Was this CEO tough-mindedness, or elitist hypocrisy? Was the criticism of her for this edict sexist? Or was it appropriate anger that regular working moms were being thrown under the bus?) But, beyond the mere provocative, Mayer (formerly a senior executive at Google), like Couric, had been brought in to rescue a failing once stellar brand (Yahoo had stumbled badly, just as CBS News had); Mayer, like Couric, had represented a feminist triumph in that ascent of hers; and, just like Katie, Mayer—with all eyes on her—had initially fumbled the task before getting her sea legs.

  Maybe Yahoo would be Katie’s last hurrah. Or: Maybe these two similar women would be a dynamic inventive combination.

  • • •

  FOR DIANE, THE NEW YEAR—2014—started out with a fair amount of attention. In a published conversation with her friend Lee Woodruff (Bob Woodruff’s wife), she confronted the rumors that had been brewing about her retirement. “I’m still here and I’m loving it,” she said. “I would be delusional not to think that at some point I will want to step down. And I’m sure there will come a time when people will say”—unconsciously, she mimics Meryl Streep accepting her last Oscar—“‘Her? Again? Still?’ But right now my job is giving me the opportunity to wake up in the morning and say, ‘What if we . . . ?’ ‘Why don’t we . . . ?’ ‘Look at this!’ or ‘Somebody’s got to do something!’” These exclamations, these proddings, that curiosity, that intense team leading: These had been, for decades now, pure Diane.

  But at the same time, in January 2014, Andrew Tyndall, who had never been a fan of Diane’s broadcasts, released a scathing content analysis report that was seized upon by the media. Headlined “ABC World News Is Certifiably Disneyfied,” Tyndall’s invective started off by saying that “2013 mark[ed] the year when ABC World News rejected the mission of presenting a serious newscast. ABC covered all four of the major domestic policy stories least heavily [of the three major networks]: the Budget debate, the Healthcare rollout, Gun control, and National Security Agency surveillance. Same with foreign policy: ABC spent the least time on the civil war in Syria and its chemical weapons disarmament, the military coup in Egypt, and on Afghanistan.” He added that Diane’s broadcast had bumped up its coverage of sports, entertainment, and true crime, especially the George Zimmerman case and madman Ariel Castro’s “hell house” in Cleveland, Ohio, where three young women had been held captive for years.

  Clearly, this was not all about Diane—in media coverage of Tyndall’s blistering report, Ben Sherwood was called out for “fluffing up” GMA in order to successfully overtake Today, and as news division president, Sherwood had the ultimate responsibility. And some media people (who relentlessly gossiped about Tyndall’s report) went further, speculating, as one put it, that the news softening had all come “from Burbank” and that ABC president Anne Sweeney had “a grand plan to homogenize all aspects of Disney’s TV empire, not only within ABC News (making GMA and World News and Nightline similar) but also across ESPN and A&E, making journalism more like SportsCenter and reality TV.”

  But Diane was the implicit primary target of the criticism. ABC News’s spokesperson retorted to the Tyndall Report: “Our mission is to give our viewers information that is relevant to their everyday lives. Winning the Murrow for Best Newscast in 2013 and enjoying our best season in five years”—Diane’s show placed second in viewership, between front-runner Williams and Scott Pelley—“is far more meaningful than Tyndall’s method that confuses quantity with quality.” In his rebuttal to ABC, Tyndall seized on the network’s own phrase “relevant to their everyday lives” as proof of his characterization. Indeed, Diane’s early executive producer Jon Banner had said that Diane was an “advocate” for the viewer and that the era of the news anchor speaking stentorially from great Olympian heights was over while the era of anchor-as-peer, interacting with experts and correspondents to help real Americans, was now appropriate.

  It was hard not to get the feeling that “relevance to everyday lives” was code for soft and female—a lesser frame for the presentation of news—whereas any suave, reasonably experienced, likable man in a suit could much more easily slide into the characterization of being an Olympian Cronkite. Meanwhile, Diane—completely unconcerned with Tyndall’s put-down—continued on with her social issues specials, having honed her specialty of focusing on America’s endangered children. For example, her January 31 20/20 special “Young Guns”—deftly coreported and hosted by her potentially imminent heir, David Muir—showed the shocking danger of leaving guns where children can find them, and the idiocy of “teaching” toddlers how to use firearms. Tyndall and other critics be damned; Diane, with her lifelong goal to “be of purpose,” was all in.

  Validation came for Diane in early spring 2014. During the week of April 7, her World News narrowly beat Brian Williams’s Nightly News by twelve thousand viewers—in the prized twenty-five-to-fifty-four demographic, ending, at least for that one week, Williams’s unbroken five-year-long winning streak.

  But that triumph proved insufficient. On June 25, 2014, in an announcement that rose to the top of the news and went viral, ABC reported that Diane would be leaving her World News anchorship in August, to be replaced by David Muir, with George Stephanopoulos lead-anchoring during elections. She would still do her spe
cial interviews, such as the one she conducted two weeks earlier with Hillary Clinton. The announcement was strictly ABC’s; Diane offered no comment.

  Less than a week before that, on Saturday, June 21, Katie married John Molner in the backyard of her East Hampton home. Her daughters, Carrie and Ellie, and John’s two children spoke at the small ceremony. The New York Post’s Page Six pointedly noted that neither Matt Lauer nor Jeff Zucker was among the fifty guests. Katie’s syndicated afternoon show had signed off mere weeks before; she was—for now, at least—entirely off television.

  • • •

  BUT WHAT DOES it all mean? It could simply be true that, for the ever dwindling viewers of network six-thirty news—and the even more dwindling numbers of those who feel they really get their news that way rather than use those shows for an authoritative summation of the spots and blips of news they’ve been receiving in real time all day long on their mobile devices—a man in a suit is always going to be the preferred news giver. That America could keep on changing—Hillary Clinton can be the most viable candidate for president; Janet Yellin can head up the Federal Reserve—and, indeed, a woman can finally become president of a major network’s news division, as Deborah Turness did at NBC in May 2013. Yet one oddly particular niche would somehow, irrationally, always be reserved for a rearguard opinion: Only a man can be a “real” TV news anchor.

  Female media critics, in particular, have noted how distinctively hard the climb has been for women, and how attenuated or ironic have been the victories. On the occasion of Barbara Walters’s retirement announcement, Alessandra Stanley wrote in the New York Times: “In the era of Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when the networks considered the evening news too important to entrust to a woman.” And, four years earlier, when Diane became the second solo female anchor just as the network six-thirty news was becoming outdated by cable and the Internet, Stanley wryly opined: “As in other fields, women seem to break through the glass ceiling just as the air conditioning is being turned off in the penthouse office suites.”