The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  “She was becoming a star, she was pulling in the numbers—and management didn’t know how to handle it,” the team member says. “You’ve got to remember: The people who came to CNN were old network guys who’d done their time at the networks and who couldn’t make it at the networks. We used to go to the Emmys and joke, ‘You never win anything.’ And all of a sudden she’s competing with these guys—and winning.”

  • • •

  WOULD SHE LEAVE CNN for one of the big networks?

  The answer came in June 1996. Christiane renewed her CNN contract, turning down offers from the major networks. “Roone wanted to have Christiane very badly. Several times in the midnineties, he went after her, but we never got her here [at the time],” says an ABC executive. But she also cut a fairly unique deal to do four or five big foreign investigatives a year for 60 Minutes, for a million dollars. When Leslie Bennetts of Vanity Fair asked Don Hewitt about the unusual “half a loaf” deal—why didn’t they court Christiane more heavily and put her on as the needed younger female?—Hewitt, who had waxed defensive when Arledge stole Diane Sawyer away from him nine years earlier, barked ferociously: “I don’t give a fuck what the perception is! I don’t play the younger bullshit game! You’re telling me what the people in the industry say? Most of them couldn’t find their asses with both their hands! I don’t play the gender game! I play the reporter game!”

  Whether Hewitt was protesting too much or hoisting the battered Murrow/Cronkite banner, Christiane began, in 1996, a course of nonstop two-network globe-hopping. She based herself in London, “which always felt like home to her,” says Bella Pollen, the novelist who would become her close friend there in subsequent years. From 1996 through 1998, she did stories in, among other places, Israel, Cairo (where at the Pan-Arab Summit she interviewed Jordan’s King Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Gaddhafi, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak), Africa, Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Iran, and Cuba.

  In Cuba she worked with her friend David Bernknopf. “She started asking people—and they recognized her—about the reality versus what the government was telling them, and some people started yelling at her and it got quite heated: ‘We don’t want to be portrayed this way! It’s your fault, you Americans!’ But she kept asking them,” says Bernknopf. She even took the long drive to the home of a Cuban citizen who, “probably at some risk to himself, gave a shockingly honest interview” about how “‘the government promises us things but we have nothing.’”

  With Parisa Khosravi, she worked doggedly for weeks to get the first interview with Iran’s brand-new president, Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. As Christiane conducted the interview—both women using their respectively excellent (Parisa) and good enough (Christiane) Farsi to make out the words of the man now called the Smiling Mullah—“we were looking at each other,” dumbstruck, Parisa says. “‘Did he really say what it sounds like he just said? That he apologized to America for the hostage taking! ’ In the car we listened to the tape and said, ‘Boy! Big news here!’ We went back to the hotel and listened to it again, and the translators were poring over it and—Yes! That is what he said! We called Atlanta and told our bosses. ‘He apologized! ’” The new political leader of Iran had just expressed regret to the Great Satan for the most aggressive, sustained, and humiliating recent event in American foreign relations.

  Christiane and Parisa couldn’t wait to see their major scoop—which was so personally meaningful to them as Iranians—go top of the news. And it should have. Except that day—January 17, 1998—filling American TV screens instead was the image of a hitherto unheard-of, broadly smiling, wide-faced, pleasant-looking, thick-dark-haired young Los Angeles woman: Monica Lewinsky.

  In Ghana, Christiane and the young American producer Andrew Tkach—with whom she would spend a decade developing many gut-wrenching 60 Minutes pieces all over the world—made their way, in part by dugout canoes through a river full of crocodiles, to the remote villages of the Upper Volta River where a traditional form of slavery called Trokosi was still practiced. They were on the track of an important exposé: a “spirit,” a traditional priest and very powerful personage in the community, was said to be enslaving, sexually and otherwise, a seven-year-old girl who had been indentured to him by her grandfather. This was an illegal but widespread custom in this region. “We saw this little girl,” clearly overburdened, “carrying large objects. Christiane looks at the priest and, rather than making social peace to get the story, she just points right to the girl and demands to know, ‘Is this one of your slaves? ’ And the priest said yes, and she just let him have it.” Not every reporter would berate a powerful priest in a far-off country where the reporter was a barely—and warily—permitted intruder. But Christiane did just that. “She was able to express her outrage so clearly.” (The abuse was reported to a human rights agency.)

  “In stories like these, when you interview people whose lips were chopped off so they couldn’t tell secrets, whose limbs were cut off so they wouldn’t inform on the rebels”—as he and Christiane did in a piece on child soldiers in Uganda—“the emotions are overpowering,” Tkach says. “You definitely get sucked into their world.” The child soldiers story was particularly painful, showing, as it did, not just cruelty but a moral dilemma. The youthful Ugandan strongmen “would empty whole schools, kidnap the children, and take them into northern Uganda or southern Sudan and use them as slaves or cannon fodder. Christiane and I went to one school,” headmistressed by a brave nun named Sister Rachele, “which had been emptied. One hundred and thirty-nine girls had been taken. Sister Rachele followed the trail left by candy wrappers, because the kidnapping soldiers themselves were children. She followed the candy wrappers for an hour or two into the jungle and fearlessly confronted the commander. He forced Sister Rachele to make a deal with the devil—he said, ‘You pick the [finite number of] girls you want to take back.’ How do you interview somebody forced to make a moral choice she finds abhorrent but which means saving lives? Christiane did [the interview] with great sensitivity. One of the girls escaped. We talked to her [too]. You put it into a compartment: ‘This is really important. This is something the world should know. We are privileged to witness this; it is our duty to tell it well.’” That self-reminder is just as important as the team bonding—“the cameramen, the soundman, the producer, the correspondent Christiane, the translator, maybe an assistant producer: You become a family and you share things. That’s how you deal with those searing emotions. Because sometimes you want to cry.”

  In Rwanda, she and Tkach entered a surreal purgatory: a mammoth, airport-hangar-like detention center stuffed, from ground to ceiling, with men incarcerated for crimes they had committed during the recent genocide. It was so crowded and oppressive that even the guards wouldn’t enter—they merely opened the door for Christiane, Tkach, and the cameraman, and then they vanished. The arena “was stacked—five decks of people, all men,” Andrew says. “In each of those decks,” hundreds of “faces peered out at us. It was so tense with humanity, and with such an overpowering stench. But there was Christiane, asking these men accused of the most horrible crimes what they had to say about the atrocity. Without coddling them. Without needing to be coddled.”

  Whatever their assignment, “Christiane was able to do all the heavy lifting,” Tkach says, thanks to her discipline and stoicism. “She wasn’t complaining about being covered in flies. She was only thinking, ‘Are we getting the story? Is this working?’” In the years he worked with her, “the only time I saw Christiane flinch wasn’t when we were in any kind of danger or warfare.” Rather, it was “when we did a nonpolitical piece, in Gabon, on gorillas being repatriated into the wild. A dominant male adolescent gorilla—they’re powerful!—jumped on Christiane’s back and started pulling her hair and nipping at her clothes. Her face was, ‘I’m really scared, but I don’t want to blow it. So I won’t do anything. I’ll keep my fear in.’”

  But Christiane was hardly battle-scarred into stoicism ab
out all that she had witnessed. While in Africa, she met Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of the Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, and one of the heroes during the genocide. A few years later, when she and her friend Bella Pollen were in London, watching the movie detailing his heroics, Hotel Rwanda, on TV, “we sat slightly awkwardly side by side on the couch and I had to try terribly hard not to cry,” Bella says. Christiane blurted out, “‘I knew that man!’ Afterward we had a cup of tea and she said, ‘I was struggling so hard not to cry in front of you because I would be embarrassed.’”

  Christiane’s emotions would eventually come out, and in a fairly quick, three-year succession. As her friend Bella Pollen explains the change: From late 1997 to 2000 Christiane “fell in love, got married, had a child, and fell in love with being a mother.” She had been prepared for war and human tragedy. This transformation came as much more of a surprise to her.

  PART FOUR

  SWEEPS

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Cool Drink of Water Versus the Girl Next Door

  Diane and Katie: 1999 to 2005

  DIANE SAWYER—the queen—was in play. In December 1998, Good Morning America was in free fall. Three years earlier, Today had broken GMA’s eight-year winning streak to seize the number one Morning slot, thanks to the addition of Katie. She and Matt were a perfect nineties morning mix—suave and bouncy, neighborly and urbane, in seemingly effortless sync with each other. And with Jay’s death in January 1998 and Katie’s poignant return from bereavement leave in March, her popularity was exponentially magnified.

  That same month, March, David Westin had replaced Charlie Gibson at GMA with young Kevin Newman. Charlie had anchored Morning at ABC since 1987 with Joan Lunden and had now been cohosting with Lisa McRee for a year. He was a serious reporter, providing weight and a certain avuncularity as counterpoint to the women with whom he was paired: Both Lunden and McRee were blonds who had started out as local anchors. As such, he was a bit above it all; he didn’t procure the “gets.” He let the producers get their hands dirty with that.

  Charlie’s departure at age fifty-five was not meant to look negative. The show threw him a big on-air going-away party. But, says a then senior producer at ABC, “Charlie had been very convinced” that the network felt “his time had come and gone and it was time for someone new.” He himself later tartly admitted, “My sell-by date had arrived.”

  The new team—McRee and Newman—were poised to ascend. The trouble is: They didn’t. By late October, that was clear. “They felt junior, they felt small,” says someone who was an ABC executive at the time about how they resonated. McRee hadn’t been ABC’s initial choice to replace Lunden. The network had performed “a low-level steal,” according to the ex-executive, taking Elizabeth Vargas from NBC to give her Lunden’s job. (Vargas and Katie hadn’t gotten along—“Elizabeth was never going to inherit over there.”) But instead Vargas became the newsreader, and the anchor job went to Lisa McRee, a Texas-raised news anchor who’d worked the Dallas and Los Angeles markets. “Lisa was very good live—she was brilliant in terms of ad-libbing and thinking on her feet. But she fell short on real depth and gravitas,” says the executive. “It’s not that you have to have gravitas, but you have to be able to interview the president and put on a Halloween costume, and do everything in between. She wasn’t big enough to fill the job.”

  As for Kevin, “he was a very good broadcaster, very smart,” the ex-executive says. “And very good looking.” But “he was Canadian—that’s a little more reserved. When the World Series happened, he didn’t know how to get excited because he wasn’t American. That certainly wasn’t the only reason” ABC wanted to replace him, “but it was just emblematic.”

  In early November 1998, the ABC brass turned to Phyllis McGrady, who had long worked with Diane. “They said, ‘What can you do to the show?’” Phyllis recalls. “I said, ‘It’s hemorrhaging. Why put a Band-Aid on the show; it’s hemorrhaging pretty critically.’” Big changes—at least one if not two new anchors and a new producer—were needed, Phyllis felt.

  Shelley Ross from Primetime, who was brought in as executive producer, flew from LA to New York to win back Charlie Gibson, whom she would be meeting for the first time. As soon as she landed, she learned that Charlie wouldn’t meet with her. A former ABC executive explains: “Charlie can be impenetrable. He’s crusty and tough, and I think he brought a lot of feelings to the table” during this rewooing, including old ones of “not having been well thought of by Roone.” “He had a chip on his shoulder,” someone who worked with him adds. “For eleven years, he was a rock-solid anchor and he got the big interviews, but the show was always about Joan Lunden. She was the blond and the star.” Then, to add insult to injury, McRee, the newbie blond, remained while he was let go.

  On the flight home, analyzing Charlie’s rebuff, Ross got clear signals that he probably “didn’t think he could turn GMA around with Lisa McRee—the show was so damaged,” she says. Then it struck her: “Having the best prom date would get him back. Having Diane Sawyer as cohost—he wouldn’t say no to that!”

  Shelley picked up the Airfone and called Diane to explore the prospect. “Diane’s first reaction was, ‘I think my time to do the morning show has come and gone’—she’d already done CBS Morning—‘and I think you’ll find there’s somebody else out there who’s better suited,’” Shelley recounts. Diane had just turned fifty-three. “I knew she was saying she thought she had aged out of a morning show. There were all these young perky anchors; they had never hired somebody at Diane’s age. I said, ‘Diane, I don’t agree.’ I gave her part of my spiel”—about how ageless she was and what her star power could give to the show—“when she said, ‘But I would do anything to help the news division.’” To Shelley, that felt like a yes. “She really wanted to do it—to redefine a morning show.”

  Shelley had already had a prior conversation with Diane, when Shelley had left Primetime for GMA. She had told Diane she wanted to change the news cycle, establish GMA as a new flagship. “There was nothing to damage one’s news credentials,” in Shelley’s formulation. There was also this: Airtime is oxygen to highly successful TV news stars. The prospect of two hours of almost unrelieved airtime a day—ten hours of it a week—may well have had an irresistible pull on Diane even beyond the pull of duty to the news division. Yet, according to Shelley, Diane’s interest was more in dropping the invisible wall between an anchor and her audience; she wanted to be less formal with viewers, who saw her as somewhat uptight on Primetime. Still, helping the news division was no small consideration. Because GMA’s ratings had dropped with Newman and McRee, the local affiliates were threatening to take back the seven to nine a.m. time slot. The revenue at stake was hundreds of millions of dollars. And Diane would not have to leave Primetime—she could continue to contribute as much as she wanted—in order to take GMA. “In a nutshell,” Shelley says, “Diane’s yes wasn’t about the GMA anyone knew. She was committed to the GMA that we were going to build.”

  Shelley, still in flight, then called Phyllis and said, “Phyllis, I’ve got the answer.” That answer was the GMA Dream Team. Phyllis said she would talk to David Westin. When Phyllis didn’t call back, Shelley called her again—and Phyllis said that Westin had responded, “In the game of chess, you never expose your queen.”

  After Shelley landed in LA, Diane called her and said, “I haven’t heard from anyone yet.” Shelley assured Diane: “You will.” Shelley then called Phyllis again and said, “Diane really wants to do this!” That led to the hastily scheduled secret meeting when the ABC executives, overriding David Westin’s original objection—or bringing him around to their thinking—decided that, yes, they must play their queen after all.

  It was two days before Christmas. They now had to make an official offer to Diane—urgently. Westin and McGrady went to Diane’s Fifth Avenue apartment. “But I can tell you,” says an executive who had been in on the secret meeting, �
��there was always an escape hatch for Diane.” The offer was structured so that “Diane could always say, ‘I’m out of here’ if the ratings were looking” bad. The offer “allowed her to always say, ‘I never said I was going to stay. I only said I was coming for three months.’ Diane’s very much like that,” says a strategist. In seriously considering saying yes to GMA, “she was taking a flyer—she was jumping off a cliff to do this.”

  Phyllis and David launched into their pitch. As Phyllis recalls it: “We said a Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson pairing is a major statement that immediately sends the message: ‘We’re serious. These are two of our top people who are now going to be anchoring this morning program. Good Morning America is a show that’s been on ABC for a lot of years. It’s been number one, it has a lot of tradition, and it’s sort of lost its way.’ And this is signal to say: ‘We are back. And we’re back in a big, big way.’”

  One stumbling block was that Diane “didn’t really know Charlie,” Phyllis explains. “They knew each other to say hello, but they’d never worked together. So it was kind of like, ‘Do you really think so? I’m not so sure.’”

  Even though Shelley had gotten the strong sense that Diane wanted it, Westin and McGrady felt they had to keep pressing their case—and they did so. “The viewer doesn’t know what we know—that you’re funny, that you have a great sense of humor, that you are so curious about everything. A two-hour program every day allows you a huge, huge canvas,” Phyllis reminded her friend. Did that appeal to Diane? “Of course!” Phyllis says. “We kind of knew it would appeal to her. And yet it’s live. It’s a lot of show—two hours a day.” Diane was intrigued, but “she still wasn’t sure”—not atypical musing and equivocation for Diane.