The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Diane’s December 2002 interview with Whitney Houston was one of several that she conducted with celebrities dogged by controversy, including Mel Gibson and Rihanna, during which her mature skill as an interviewer and her downplaying of her own once-distracting glamour allowed the subject to reveal striking vulnerability. During this conversation, the troubled singer—once America’s music-video sweetheart—used bravado and arrogance to dispel rumors that she had had a drug problem. But Diane bore down, shrewdly declining to play the Polite Blond Lady (a tactic that had worked in smoking out Gibson’s bellicose bigotry). Her combination of concern and toughness led Houston to an epiphany she painfully shared with America. When Sawyer asked her who the devil was, the singer, in a near whisper, admitted, “The devil is me.”

  Diane, the committed world-circling journalist and fevered perfectionist, would not miss a chance to fly to a far-away crisis—in this case, the East Indian tsunami that struck in late December 2004—even if it meant trading off something crucial: desk time on Good Morning America during a crunch moment in the show’s long-fought-for ratings race against Today. Here, Diane watches purified water being loaded onto the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.

  When Diane ascended to World News anchor over the 2009–10 holiday season, it was as if every accomplishment in her thirty-year-long TV news career had led seamlessly to this capstone moment. She spent her first month on the move: grilling Iranian president Ahmadinejad in Copenhagen, helicoptering around Afghanistan with General Stanley McChrystal, and commandeering a series of aircraft to get to the Haiti earthquake.

  “Senior Katie Couric gives the stands her fantastic smile,” announces the caption of the 1974 Yorktown High yearbook. Katie was a cheerleader for most of her high school years in Alexandria, Virginia, as well as senior class president. The Leave It to Beaver–like childhood she lived as the wisecracking kid sister of three siblings with a working dad and stay-at-home mom would later serve her well in personifying a Middle American everywoman with a wry edge.

  When Katie (here, in demure dress and pearls) joined the team at brand-new CNN Atlanta in the early 1980s, she was thought to be stunningly young-looking even by fellow junior colleagues. Some dismissed her as peppy and lightweight; others saw the powerful ambition that lay beneath that convenient veneer. In 1982 she surprised senior colleagues by being promoted to producer of CNN’s Today-style show Take Two, anchored by Chris Curle (the platinum blonde at far right) and her husband, Don Farmer (back to camera) .

  When Barbara Walters was the first female star of the Today show, despite the fact that she created the entire template, she was barred by her cohost, Frank McGee, from asking the first, second, third, and fourth questions (he got those) of any guest they jointly interviewed. When Katie became the show’s new female face in 1991, it was instantly clear that she had authority—and suffer-no-fools repartee—on a par with the male cohost, the famously arrogant Bryant Gumbel. Here, in 1994, the woman who broke down the door and the woman who came in with not a shred of timidity—and made herself arguably the most successful anchor in the genre’s history—have a tête-à-tête in Rockefeller Plaza.

  After Katie met lawyer Jay Monahan at a Washington party in the late 1980s, she described him to a friend as “Heathcliffian.” The ambitious, peppy, messy on-the-rise TV star married the neat-freak man of accomplishment, gravity, and originality in June 1989. Two years later, Katie’s rocketing to stardom, amid their starting a family, raised inevitable challenges to their marriage. Here they are in early 1997, right before a shocking diagnosis of advanced colon cancer changed everything. Jay died in January 1998.

  Being a mother meant a lot to Katie. Unlike the way Diane or Christiane felt about it as their careers progressed, motherhood was something that she was never going to do without. Here, in March 1996, Katie—who two months earlier had given birth to her and Jay’s second daughter, Carrie—poses with their four-and-a-half-year-old, Ellie (center), and Ellie’s friend.

  From the beginning of her tenure as Today cohost, Katie had had it stipulated in her contract that she share equally the substantive interviews with her male cohost. Early in her career she had scored a strikingly successful interview with President George H. W. Bush, virtually ambushing him with questions he wasn’t expecting. Here, in April 1999, she takes on President Clinton.

  In the history of TV news stars and producers, few pairings had been as instantly inspired and relentlessly successful as that of Katie Couric and Jeff Zucker. They met when she, a novice at NBC New York, ran into the junior producer in the network hallway and cheekily insulted his shoes. Over the ensuing decade and a half, Jeff was one of the few people who would tell the truth to the strong-willed and increasingly powerful Katie, even though “she’s not gonna admit that I’m right,” he says. And “even if she doesn’t like” what he might have to say. Such an occasion was the one punctuated by this farewell-to-NBC kiss in 2006.

  Katie’s last day at Today—Wednesday, May 31, 2006—was, as Matt Lauer promised, “like an episode of This Is Your Life.” There were snippets of her at all the stations she’d worked at throughout her career; a witty video clip pointing out her infamous lateness; a highlights reel of her most memorable moments—from inciting Yasser Arafat’s wrath to flying as Tinkerbell through the Plaza—to this bouquet of flowers from a young fan. Now she would go on to her summer listening tour and in the fall, at forty-nine, she’d become, via CBS Evening News, the first woman to solo-anchor any network evening news show.

  Katie’s early autumn 2008 three-part interview with vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin changed her luck at the CBS Evening News, where she had very briefly soared, then hit a she-can-do-no-right patch, and now was struggling with lackluster ratings, resentment from her far-less-compensated CBS News colleagues, and lack of challenge. Katie’s knowledgeable, insistent probing of the Alaska governor yielded some cringe-inducing answers (Palin could not name a single newspaper that she read or a Supreme Court opinion she disagreed with) and also showed Palin to be more hard- than middle-right on some important social issues. The interview series affected the outcome of the presidential election and won Katie the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism from USC’s Annenberg School.

  By April 2010, when this photo was taken, Katie had been anchoring the CBS Evening News for three and a half years. She had recovered from a bad low, had gained stature with her Palin interviews, had deftly provoked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into going out of his way to decry special status, among war crimes, for the Holocaust, and had been the first anchor on the ground during the catastrophic January Haiti earthquake. But her show’s low ratings—which had existed even before she was expensively drafted to save the day—augured ill.

  Christiane Amanpour was nineteen and living in London in 1977 when this photograph was taken at her close friend Diana Bellew’s house in Hampshire, England. The two girls, who had “met cute” (they originally couldn’t stand each other) at convent boarding school three years earlier, were now best friends. With her long, Farrah Fawcett–styled hair, her post-high-school job at a London department store, and her fascination with the Swedish pop group ABBA, “Kissy,” as Diana and her family called her, was not someone one might expect to become the world’s most passionate conflict zone journalist.

  Christiane’s years driving home to CNN viewers the atrocities against the civilian population in Bosnia, in the early to mid-1990s, were fundamental to her development as a fearless reporter and advocate for international justice. She has said, “I consider Bosnia the most important thing I’ve ever done.” Her relentless stand-ups—such as this early one in front of a cemetery in 1992—forced Americans to know about the targeted deaths of children and the rapes of women in the country they’d barely heard of. As her equally dedicated colleague, war photographer Ron Haviv, says, “Anger was [our] motivating factor. She was going live, every night, from Sarajevo. Day
one, day five. . . . Day one hundred.”

  Christiane—the daughter of recent Iranian exiles who’d left all their worldly goods in their villa when the Revolution came—had become close friends with John Kennedy Jr. when he was at Brown and she was at the University of Rhode Island. They were housemates and confidants, and she frequently joined him and other friends at his mother’s elegant home on Martha’s Vineyard. Their post-college friendship—exemplified by this undated photograph—and mutual admiration deepened. When she was newly pregnant in the summer of 1999, she and her husband, Jamie, spent what she’s called “a very happy, lovely, normal, friendly couples weekend” with him and Carolyn on Martha’s Vineyard. Days later, when his small, self-piloted plane got lost over—and ultimately plunged into—that same island’s waters, John and his wife were dead.

  After a rather whirlwind courtship and a January 1998 engagement (Christiane’s flouting of her diamond ring on the airstrip almost cost her, at zero hour, a long-planned assignment in Iran), Christiane married Jamie Rubin, Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s spokesman, in August 1998. Their dual-religion wedding was held in the Italian lakeside town Bracciano. The Catholic ceremony was performed at the Church of Santo Stefano; the Jewish one at a castle, Castello Orsini-Odescalchi. The public wasn’t (and isn’t) used to this Christiane—the veiled bride.

  Christiane’s breaking-news cut-ins were a familiar sight to viewers of CNN shows such as Wolf Blitzer Reports during her long tenure as the network’s chief international correspondent, between the end of her Bosnia coverage in the late 1990s and her departure for America in 2007. She reported from a dizzying array of countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—sometimes taking a quick flight from one country, where she was reporting for 60 Minutes on CBS, to a different country to cover a major crisis for CNN. In March 2004, she rushed to Madrid to report on the backpack bombing that killed 191 train passengers, igniting Europe’s sense of vulnerability to terrorism.

  Here, Christiane is in Tehran, properly head-scarved, as any Western newswoman must be, reporting on the Ashura holiday season, when, according to Shi’a Muslim tradition, people walk through the street and whip themselves with chains to reenact the suffering of the martyr Hussein. During one of the observances being filmed for CNN’s documentary God’s Muslim Warriors, Christiane “was sitting next to a woman who was hugging her emotionally,” her friend and producer Andrew Tkach recalls. The Iranian-raised daughter of a Muslim father, “Christiane played right along,” understanding the woman’s fervor as only a person who intimately knew that culture could.

  Christiane had not necessarily thought of getting married, or having a child, during her independent years reporting in war zones. Her two younger sisters knew that their onetime virtual “second mother” wasn’t a gusher over babies. When she was pregnant, Christiane was even honest about the certainly welcome but still mysterious feelings of maternal love. She even macho-kidded (with one eye trained on men who’d have loved to take her place in war zones) that nothing would change; her baby would simply wear “bullet-proof diapers.” But once she had her son, Darius John—here, at age eight, with his parents in New York in 2008—everything changed. Her love for her child was as surprising and all-encompassing as her decade in dangerous war zones had become routine. She became the ultimate conflicted modern mother: juggling serious, travel-dependent work she was passionate about with possessive, hands-on care of a child who meant the world to her.

  If Christiane played the native daughter in Tehran, in another Muslim country she reported from on numerous occasions—Afghanistan—she was all-Western. Here, she is talking to enrollees at a U.S.-government-built school for girls in the Jalalabad Province during the filming of CNN’s Generation Islam, which was produced and aired in 2009 after Christiane had made her—rocky—return to state-side CNN.

  When the Arab Spring broke out in all its early euphoria in January 2011, stealing headlines and airtime from every other event, Christiane, by now host of ABC’s This Week, did what everyone expected she’d do: She became the only reporter to interview the intensely beleaguered and soon-to-be deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarek, a scoop that engendered jealousy throughout her industry.

  If Christiane had been passionate about pushing Americans to care about Bosnia, she was just as passionate about getting them to care about the unending humanitarian crises in Africa. “There is a big prejudice” in American news “about telling news from Africa,” she said; it was one of her prime missions to bust through that aversion. From the late nineties to the present day, she has repeatedly shone the spotlight on heartrending tragedies—most of them with children as victims—on the continent. But she felt guiltiest about the U.S.-media-ignored genocide in Rwanda, which took place mostly while she was busy in Bosnia. In 2008, she returned to Rwanda to film the special Scream Bloody Murder: Rwanda about the genocide. The jubilation she felt in experiencing the native kids’ resilience resonates in this picture.

  * In November 2013, 60 Minutes’s reputation took an unexpected hit when a report that correspondent Lara Logan and producer Max McClellan did on the terrorist attack in Benghazi in September 2012 turned out to be based on the false claims of its featured interview subject and source.

  * Morning show audiences become so loyally attached to their hosts that even the most popular shows are punished for what seems like a cruel expulsion. In 2012, when Ann Curry left the Today show—with a teary good-bye—to be replaced by Savannah Guthrie, fans took out their anger on Matt Lauer, who had always enjoyed huge popularity on the show that Katie’s fourteen-year tenure made unbeatable. As a result, Today’s ratings plummeted and GMA grabbed the number one Morning spot. In April 2013, Today’s public relations train crashed when it was revealed that Today had essentially removed Curry. The term that was used on NBC in 1991 resurfaced in 2013: implosion.

  * “It’s not the word itself so much as the way it sounds that’s so ridiculous,” Katie ultimately said. “I looked it up in the dictionary recently, and the definition I can live with: ‘briskly self-confident, jaunty.’ That’s not so bad.”

  *Katie, who had started at Today with a salary of about $500,000, used every opportunity to procure raises commensurate with her contribution to the network. When in 1994 a threatened Roone Arledge boosted Diane Sawyer’s compensation to $4 million, Katie pushed for, and got, a healthy though undisclosed raise. By the end of her tenure at Today Katie had a four-year contract worth $60 million to $65 million.

  * In 2005, Nancy Poznek was sued for aggravated harassment by her subsequent employer, Carol Feinberg, for writing letters to Feinberg’s friends and family (including to Feinberg’s young son), imparting negative impressions of Feinberg. The lawsuit claimed the nanny “embarked upon an intentional and malicious campaign to harm, harass, and disparage her.” Noting that the plaintiff’s free speech rights outweighed the “potential damage to the plaintiff,” and that the lack of “face to face interaction between plaintiff and defendant” defrayed the threat of a breach of peace, the judge ruled in favor of Poznek and stanched the lawsuit. New York Post reporter Dan Mangan interviewed both Poznek and Feinberg; despite the lawsuit lodged against her by Poznek, Feinberg told Mangan that Poznek had been an excellent nanny.

  * In another first, the convention was chaired by a woman, Kentucky governor Martha Layne Collins, who happened to have been the home economics teacher at Seneca High when Diane Sawyer was a freshman there.

  * Margaret Moth continued working, despite her injury and its complications, until and after she was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2007. She died in 2010, at age fifty-nine.

  * Much of this account has been taken from the diary David Rust wrote nightly in Sarajevo—encrypted, in case he was captured or a checkpoint guard asked to examine his belongings—portions of which he generously volunteered to share for this book.

  * Oberstein’s continued mention of an explosion while n
ot mentioning having seen a plane eventually made this snippet of a videotape a favorite among 9/11 Truthers, who insist that the September 11 attacks were an inside job.

  * Among them: Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yasir Arafat, Geraldine Ferraro, Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan, Madeleine Albright, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Laura Bush, Jeb Bush, Janet Reno, Warren Christopher, Richard Holbrooke, Christine Todd Whitman, Newt Gingrich, Condoleezza Rice, King Abdullah of Jordan, Bob Dole, Leon Panetta, Dick Armey, Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Tariq Aziz, Norman Schwarzkopf, Anita Hill, Dan Quayle, Ross Perot, Joe Biden, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ariel Sharon, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Dick Cheney, Sandra Day O’Connor, Henry Kissinger, John Kerry, and John Edwards.

  * Newsweek apologized for the article twenty years later, in 2006. It turned out that the dire prediction in the 1985 Harvard/Yale marriage study that had been the basis for the sensational cover line was not borne out in the ensuing years. Women over forty were, indeed, getting married.

  * To date, Amanpour has won eleven Emmys, two George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Walter Cronkite Award, the Courage in Journalism Award, the Goldsmith Award, the Fourth Estate Award, and she played a major role in two DuPont Awards given to CNN. She has been the recipient of honorary doctorates at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Amherst College, University of Southern California, Emory University, and Georgia State University, and an honorary graduation class membership at Harvard. She has received honorary citizenship from the city of Sarajevo and has been named the Persian Woman of the Year, among numerous other awards and fellowships, including one named for fellow journalist Daniel Pearl, murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, and another named for fellow journalist Anthony Shadid, who died in the course of duty under hardship in Syria.