The News Sorority by Sheila Weller

Author:Sheila Weller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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