Katie Couric on Diane Sawyer: ‘I Wonder Whom She Blew This Time’

In a juicy new tell-all guide, Couric comes across as brash, striving, and self-absorbed, and Sawyer is a Machiavellian, often-inscrutable workaholic.

Lloyd Grove

Editor in particular

The Regular Beast

For Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and Christiane Amanpour, the minute of facts are planning to arrive—or at the least a book-length facsimile https://datingmentor.org/turkmenistan-dating/ thereof.

Information professionals and system publicists have now been distracting by themselves out of this summer time’s seriously depressing or perhaps alarming world occasions by passing around and poring over bound galleys regarding the Information Sorority, veteran journalist Sheila Weller’s gossipy chronicle of this increase (and periodic stumbles) of three of tv news’ best-known ladies.

In Weller’s narrative—which, as the subtitle indicates, aspires to report “the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV Information”—Couric comes down as brash, striving, self-absorbed, and sometimes insensitive to your realities faced by her less well-compensated colleagues, yet steeled by individual tragedy (the cancer-related fatalities of her spouse along with her sis) and effective at big-hearted generosity.

Sawyer is a Machiavellian, often-inscrutable workaholic who makes use of her seductive charm and apperance to expert benefit and torments news producers along with her relentless perfectionism and insecurity—an obvious result of a fraught relationship together with her judgmental, solid mom (whom once delivered the adult Sawyer in to a self-flagellating death spiral, Weller writes, whenever she criticized exactly exactly how her TV celebrity child had made her bed).

Amanpour could be the reigning queen regarding the warzone, more actually courageous and resourceful than her male peers in perilous combat circumstances, however with a sporadically off-putting feeling of moral superiority which, along side her posh accent that is british sometimes renders her brittle and inaccessible to American audiences—a element which appears to have hampered her profession.

All three, in Weller’s account, are excellent reporters that have risen up to the top their career through sheer talent, brains, and time and effort in a market whoever tradition, even yet in the next ten years for the twenty-first century, continues to be a lot more than vestigially sexist. Within one anecdote that is representative CBS Information Executive Vice President Paul Friedman publicly muses on an open sound line about which feminine anchor appears worse without makeup—Sawyer or Couric.

“I happened to be blown right right right back in my own seat,” a producer that is female Weller. “What achieved it say about a person in senior administration he shouldn’t say that, of his boss [Katie], aloud? that he didn’t understand”

The expansive book, which operates to 471 pages sans index (the area which will truly function as many closely look over by people within the biz), won’t become officially available for sale until its Sept. 30 launch date. But Weller along with her publisher, Penguin Press, have already been working overtime to create buzz—along by having a reasonable level of teeth-gnashing—by publishing things on Facebook and dispersing early copies to preferred news outlets, like the frequent Beast.

*When Sawyer had been up for the work at CBS Information’ Washington bureau after years when you look at the press workplace in the Nixon White home after which assisting the disgraced previous president with their memoirs in San Clemente, Dan Rather suggested CBS Information President Bill Small: “Don’t employ her!” Instead later admitted he’d been wrong.

*Sawyer’s longtime live-in boyfriend, investment banker (and previous and future diplomat) Richard Holbrooke (whom later married journalist Kati Marton), “did the dirty work with her,” a CBS staffer states, “and he drove everybody crazy… He would phone the professional producer [of the CBS Morning Information] each day to state, ‘Why doesn’t Diane do have more to complete?’…”

*When 60 Minutes impresario Don Hewitt hired Sawyer for the plum perch on their Sunday that is top-rated show a prominent CBS producer explained her fast increase in this way: “You gotta understand—the guys who own and run the networks all have the shiksa disease.”

*When Sam Donaldson, Diane’s internally popular co-anchor on ABC’s Primetime magazine show, came back from prostate cancer tumors surgery and did an actually grueling story of a survivalist surviving in the backwoods, certainly one of Weller’s ABC Information sources says, “Diane called everyone and stated, ‘That had been a truly terrible piece—let’s be sure it does not take place once again.’”

*Sawyer’s famous rivalry with Barbara Walters for ratings-grabbing meeting topics ended up being similar to combat that is mortal. “Barbara and Diane had been determined to destroy each other—to wipe each other from the face regarding the earth,” says an ABC Information staffer.

*After toiling at NBC Nightly Information and making to create a novel as he didn’t obtain the administrator producer’s task, Ben Sherwood angled to run Good America, where Sawyer was the lead anchor in the early 2000s morning. “Ben, who was as cunning and seductive as Diane, really wooed Diane,” claims an insider. “He had written her e-mails…‘Why do you do this?’ ‘ right here’s when i do believe you’re going incorrect.’ That’s exactly how he wormed their method in.”

*After only 6 months of running GMA, Sherwood left the task, formally to take care of a parent that is ailing but actually because Sawyer had lost faith in him. “Ben is therefore weak,” she said independently.

*Sherwood fundamentally came back as president of ABC Information, having charmed system chief Anne Sweeney and Disney Chairman Bob Iger. “But now he wasn’t beholden to Diane,” claims a Sherwood pal. “With Ben, I don’t think he provides a rat’s ass” what Sawyer desires. “Ben’s gonna place it to her. She will pay dearly. She may have met her match in Ben.”