VIDEO, Page 46COVER STORY: Star PowerDiane Sawyer, with a new prime-time show and a $1.6 millioncontract, is hot. But are celebrity anchors like her upstagingthe news?By Richard Zoglin
First there are the blond-haired good looks: striking but
somehow wholesome, more high school prom queen than Hollywood
glamour puss. Then there's the rich, honeyed voice: husky and
authoritative, but free of the severe tone affected by some females
in TV news. As a reader of the news, she is masterly: businesslike
but warm, her eyes now wide with the drama of the day, now
crinkling ever so slightly with concern. Diane Sawyer doesn't just
deliver the news, she performs it.
But there's more than mere show-biz flair here. Sawyer is a
fully credentialed reporter who covered Three Mile Island and the
Iran hostage crisis. Later she demonstrated smarts and interviewing
skills as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News. As a member of the
formidable 60 Minutes team since 1984, she has traveled from the
garbage mounds of Cairo to the heart of the AIDS plague in Uganda,
profiled the likes of Corazon Aquino and James Michener, and given
then candidate George Bush perhaps his toughest TV grilling on the
Iran-contra scandal. If she never seemed an indispensable cog in
the powerful engine that is 60 Minutes, she was no Tinkertoy
either.
Have a conversation with Sawyer, and you cannot help coming
away impressed. Intelligent, articulate, polished -- and a bit
calculated. (She calls a reporter at home to amend her earlier list
of favorite reading: add Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Mann's Tonio
Kroger to a shelf that already features Flaubert, Henry James and
John Fowles.) In earnest, carefully molded sentences, she strives
to dispel the notion that she is strictly a TV creation. "I really
love what you learn every day in the business," she says. "I love
the breathtaking way we walk into people's lives and ask them
anything we want and then leave. For a moment you have available
to you the whole universe of a person's life -- the pain and the
suffering and the joy and the struggle. You can learn from it and
take it with you, and then come back the next day with somebody
else. That's what I like to do."
Is it any wonder that Sawyer, at 43, is the hottest newswoman
in television? The sort of star news executives battle over, make
promises to, open their wallets for? Last February, after more than
ten years at CBS, she was hired away by ABC for a reported $1.6
million a year. The primary lure: the chance to join Sam Donaldson
as co-anchor of Prime Time Live, the new weekly show that will
debut this Thursday at 10 p.m. EDT. In addition, ABC dangled
occasional fill-in anchor duty on World News Tonight and Nightline.
The prospect of losing Sawyer so rattled CBS's bigwigs that they
virtually handed her a blank check in an effort to keep her; then,
when she was irretrievably gone, they ran out and hired another
high-priced star, NBC's Connie Chung, to fill the gap and save some
face.
And yet the question nags: Is Sawyer really worth it? Indeed,
are any of TV's high-profile news stars worth the money they are
paid, the power bestowed upon them, the fuss made over them? At
least a dozen network-news personalities currently earn more than
a million dollars a year and vie for a few high-visibility
showcases. Traditionally, these slots were limited to the morning
and evening newscasts, but they are spreading into prime time as
well. Along with Sawyer's program, this week will see the debut of
another magazine show, NBC's Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow. Its
hosts: Mary Alice Williams, a former CNN anchor hired by NBC to
much fanfare in March; Chuck Scarborough, a popular local anchorman
for New York City's WNBC-TV; and Maria Shriver, a Kennedy. CBS,
meanwhile, is in the process of revamping its four-year-old
magazine show West 57th around its newest star anchor, Chung.
In the commerce of TV news, these personalities probably earn
their pay. Stars draw viewers, and that means higher ratings and
higher ad revenue for the network. TV's top-rated magazine show,
60 Minutes, earns an estimated $40 million a year for CBS; 20/20
brings in $15 million to $20 million annually for ABC. In a survey
conducted for TIME by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 52% of TV viewers
polled said they consider the anchor "very important" in choosing
which network newscast to watch, though only 41% feel that anchors
deserve to be paid a million dollars.
The crucial question, however, is not whether news stars
deserve the money but whether they deserve the stature. Although
most are competent reporters, they have reached their positions
largely because of qualities that have little to do with
journalism: the way they look, the tone of their voices, their
on-camera charm. Yet they have influence that betokens great wisdom
and judgment. They are the people America listens to, relies on,
trusts. The major events of the day are filtered through their eyes
and ears. News becomes bigger news simply because they are present
-- in Paris for a presidential visit or Tiananmen Square for a
nation's aborted experiment with democracy. The danger is that as
stars become more and more important in the high-stakes world of
TV journalism, they are overwhelming the news they purport to
report.
Sawyer, more than any of her colleagues, embodies all the
contradictions of TV news: that uneasy mix of journalism and show
business, reporting and acting, substance and style. Her experience
as a reporter, while not negligible, is on the slender side. Sawyer
came to network news rather late, at 32, after spending nearly
eight years as an aide to President (and then ex-President) Richard
Nixon. As a correspondent, she won respect for her doggedness and
intelligence, but she was helped by some shrewd career moves and
smart packaging. At 60 Minutes, for instance, she benefited from
a corps of the best producers in TV news; still, according to
insiders, she had difficulty with the format and was less
productive than the show's other correspondents. "She's a
monumental talent," says executive producer Don Hewitt. "But her
coming to the broadcast didn't do that much for us. And her leaving
has not even remotely crippled 60 Minutes." (She will be replaced
this fall by Meredith Vieira and Steve Kroft, formerly of West
57th.)
Few TV newspeople, moreover, have moved in such glittery social
circles. Sawyer has kept company with a raft of celebrities, from
Warren Beatty to Henry Kissinger, and last year married director
Mike Nichols. She was the subject of a glamorous (too glamorous for
some of her colleagues) Annie Leibovitz photo spread in Vanity Fair
magazine. At CBS she cultivated friendships with founder William
Paley and president Laurence Tisch, both of whom have taken a
personal interest in her career. Says a veteran CBS hand: "She's
the best politician I've ever come across."
"Ambitious" is a word often used to describe Sawyer, but the
fact is that others have had ambitions for her as well. In 1986,
as her CBS contract neared renewal, Sawyer was avidly pursued by
NBC. To keep her, CBS upped her salary to $1.2 million and promised
to give her additional projects besides 60 Minutes: subbing for Dan
Rather on the CBS Evening News and hosting a series of Person to
Person specials, patterned after the old Edward R. Murrow interview
series.
But the anchor stints were sparse (reportedly because Rather
was jealous of her), and Person to Person never got off the ground,
largely because of Hewitt's resistance to letting his 60 Minutes
star do outside work. That left an opening for ABC News president
and chief starmaker Roone Arledge. In May 1988 he approached Sawyer
with a proposal to co-anchor a new prime-time show he was
developing. She declined, saying she did not want to leave 60
Minutes in the lurch as it was gearing up for a new season. But
when Arledge tried again in January, she was more receptive. A deal
was consummated in two weeks. "I always thought Diane was very
good," says Arledge, "but I never had anything right for her until
I came up with this show. Look at the success that Barbara Walters
has had: she is set apart from the rest of the industry. I think
Diane will have that same kind of success."
Just what the new show will be was still in flux just days
before airtime. Produced by Richard Kaplan, formerly of Nightline,
the live weekly hour will be a mix of interviews, reports on
breaking news stories and town meeting-like discussions. Sawyer
describes it as a "lateral slice" of the week's news. Arledge
compares its free-form structure to Olympics coverage: "The idea
is that we will be all over the world where things are happening."
What is most apparent is that Prime Time Live has been predicated
on -- and will succeed or fail because of -- the chemistry between
its two stars.
It's a match that might have been made in a Hollywood mogul's
heaven: the loudest reporter on the White House lawn meets the
classiest lady in TV news -- "a sonata for harp and jackhammer,"
in Sawyer's words. The pair represent different roads to TV stardom
as well. Donaldson, unlike most of his fellow TV news stars, gained
fame because of his brash, sometimes abrasive reporting rather than
his on-camera charm or polish. He and Sawyer plan to engage in
unrehearsed, possibly disputatious colloquies about issues, but
Donaldson insists that the clashes won't turn into routs. "One of
my fears was that I would be perceived as the bully," he says. "But
if we have a disagreement, Diane is not going to be intimidated.
I will probably be the one getting the sympathy votes." "We have
a natural adversarial relationship on a lot of issues," says
Sawyer. "But it's not going to be `Diane, you ignorant slut!'"
The star system, of course, is hardly a new phenomenon in TV
news: Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley were
certainly as popular as any of the current luminaries. But salaries
and network bidding wars entered a new phase in 1976, when Arledge
lured Walters away from NBC for $1 million a year. The rise of
superagents like Richard Leibner (who represents Sawyer, Rather,
Shriver and Mike Wallace, among other network news stars) has
brought about an escalation of salaries and an increase in the
clout these personalities wield.
Today, as the networks fight to retain their dwindling
audiences, prime-time news programming is becoming more desirable
because it costs only about half as much to produce as
entertainment fare. And to compete in the glitzy arena of The Cosby
Show and Dallas, stars are a must. Other entertainment elements are
creeping into these shows as well. On Prime Time Live, Sawyer and
Donaldson will be joined by an unusual (for a news show) featured
player: a live studio audience. Both Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow
and the revamped West 57th will feature dramatized "re-creations"
of events, a dubious enterprise that blurs the line between news
and entertainment. (Even ABC's World News Tonight tried the
technique two weeks ago, with mock-documentary footage ostensibly
showing suspected spy Felix Bloch handing a briefcase to a Soviet
agent. Anchor Peter Jennings last week apologized on the air that
the footage had not been clearly labeled as a simulation.)
On the evening newscasts, too, stars are being hyped more than
ever. Facing growing competition for the news viewer -- from cable
outlets like CNN, aggressive local stations and syndicated shows
-- the networks are trying to stress what makes them distinctive:
namely, their anchors. That's why Rather, Jennings and Tom Brokaw
can be seen jetting off to Eastern Europe or China whenever the
President (or a Soviet leader) hops an airplane. Network executives
gamely defend such trips on journalistic grounds, but they are
primarily promotional gimmicks meant to showcase the network's
resident Bigfoot. "We're almost defining news in such a way as to
say something's not important unless an anchor is there," says
Everette Dennis, executive director of the Gannett Center for Media
Studies. "That's regrettable. Sometimes the specialists on a
particular subject ought to be the ones dominating the coverage,
not the anchors, who are by definition generalists."
News personalities, of course, bring special skills to their
jobs that are not always appreciated. They must be able not only
to report the news but to communicate it effectively. An appealing
on-camera demeanor is no less important than a writer's prose style
or a magazine's layout. "You have to be a special combination of
person to be the focal point of a successful show," says NBC News
president Michael Gartner, a former newspaper editor. "You have to
be a good journalist, and you have to be able to deliver the
message -- which a print person doesn't have to do -- in person,
in somebody's house."
Yet an excessive focus on stars has its costs for the news
division. For one thing, it diverts resources from bread-and-butter
reporting. Salaries for top people keep going up even as the
networks trim their news budgets to the bone. Says former CBS News
president Ed Joyce: "You simply cannot pay a large stable of news
stars these million-dollar salaries in the diminished economy that
now exists in television without it coming from somewhere. My
concern is that it is happening at the expense of the basic
responsibility of network news organizations: to maintain bureaus
overseas, to maintain bureaus domestically, and to cover the news
coherently and responsibly."
What's more, these news stars -- whom the networks must keep
happy at all costs -- are wielding more and more power behind the
scenes. CBS's Rather, who is managing editor of the CBS Evening
News as well as its anchor, is a force to reckon with at CBS News,
with a major say in the assignment of reporters and even news
executives. NBC's Brokaw too has been accused of becoming an
"anchor monster," of engineering the departure of former News
president Lawrence Grossman and of being reluctant to yield the
spotlight to correspondents who might threaten him, such as Chris
Wallace (who has left the network for ABC's Prime Time Live). In
order to keep Nightline's Ted Koppel happy, ABC gave him an
unprecedented contract that allowed him to set up a production
company and make news specials both for ABC and for independent
distribution.
The anchors insist that their power has been overrated.
"Careers did not go into decline at NBC because anyone argued with
me," says Brokaw. "I protected Chris Wallace. I said it was a
mistake to lose him." CBS News president David Burke has clipped
Rather's wings a bit by shifting some of the anchorman's supporters
out of key executive positions.
Then there is the problem of what to do when stars collide.
Sawyer and Rather are a case in point. The CBS anchorman insists
that he did not prevent Sawyer from anchoring the CBS Evening News
and that he even told her she would be considered the front runner
if the network decided he needed a co-anchor. Those close to
Rather, however, are skeptical that he -- or either of the other
two network anchormen -- would willingly agree to share his
platform with a dynamic female like Sawyer.
Sawyer has proved that she can fend for herself in the
corridors of power. Her determination to reach the top rung on the
network ladder has been matched by her adeptness at making the
right moves on the way up. That political savvy probably dates from
her Louisville childhood. Her father was a Republican county
executive active in state politics; her mother was a teacher. At
17, Diane won the America's Junior Miss competition. Her talent:
reading an original poem about the Civil War and singing songs
representing the North and South. A newspaper account at the time
described Sawyer as a straight-A student who "wants to study
foreign languages, for a possible career in diplomatic and foreign
service. Her other interests include journalism."
Hearing that today, Sawyer laughs in surprise: "Really! I
thought I wandered aimlessly into this profession." She went to
Wellesley, majored in English and marched in one campus protest --
against mandatory Bible class. ("I have to confess I was ambivalent
about it, because I loved Bible class.") Meanwhile, she suffered
through an identity crisis and an undernourished social life, which
she traces to the Junior Miss "aberration." "I only dated four or
five times in college," she says. "I went to my first mixer my
first year, and I heard some guy say to his date, `That can't be
her. She's nothing special.' And I slinked out of the room and
never went to a mixer again. I became very self-conscious."
After graduation she got a job as a weather girl at a TV
station back in Louisville. Too nearsighted to see the western half
of the map from the East Coast, she made jokes on the job. "I had
no interest in the weather," she says, "and it showed nightly."
Later she did reporting; her first assignment was to follow Supreme
Court Justice William O. Douglas on a hike through Kentucky's Red
River gorge. Toting the camera and recording equipment herself, she
fell backward into the gorge while trying to get a shot. The
Justice's comment: "Are you new at this, dear?"
"I felt that the journalist's perspective was home for me,"
Sawyer says, "but I really wanted to know something about making
decisions, taking responsibility." That led her to Washington,
where her father's connections helped her land a job in the White
House press office. She started answering phones, was soon writing
press releases and eventually became a chief assistant to Press
Secretary Ron Ziegler. Her personal contact with President Nixon
at the White House was limited: their only face-to-face encounter
came when she accidentally barreled into him on the stairs leading
to the Situation Room. The eager young press aide made a better
impression with a piece she wrote for a magazine that expressed
Nixon's feelings about his mother. The President called to
compliment her; thereafter he dubbed her "the smart girl."
"She brought an intellectual spark to the press office and
creativity that was invaluable," remembers Ziegler. Another
colleague recalls, "She had a great deal of political sensitivity
for someone her age. She was smart and cunning, very clever and
resourceful. She was dogged in her approach to things: she covered
all the bases." Loyalty was another of her hallmarks. One
Washingtonian recalls sitting next to Sawyer in the cheap seats at
a radio and TV correspondents' dinner in 1973. Satirist Mark
Russell was taking swipes at Nixon's Watergate troubles, and the
audience was laughing; even Ziegler seemed to roll with the
punches. But Sawyer broke down in tears.
Dealing with the gathering Watergate storm, Sawyer recalls,
was "bruising, nerve-deadening torment." Her response was to devour
all the information she could about the scandal. "I read all the
newspapers and all the testimony and all the lawyers' briefs," she
says. "I became a kind of walking computer. Even the lawyers would
call me occasionally because I seemed to have everything on file."
Only after the famous "smoking gun" tape, released just days before
Nixon's resignation, did Sawyer become convinced that the end was
inevitable. She was one of the stalwarts who rode on the plane that
carried Nixon to San Clemente after his farewell speech. What
explains her loyalty? She ponders the question quietly for a few
seconds. "When someone's life is shattered," she says, "there is
only humanity."
To some friends, however, her loyalty went beyond reasonable
bounds: Sawyer remained with Nixon for nearly four more years in
San Clemente, helping Frank Gannon (whom she was dating) gather
material for the President's autobiography. "I had the illusion of
indispensability," she explains. Her job was to assemble all the
on-the-record material about Watergate and the Final Days -- an
assignment that led to some tense moments with the former
President. But she does not regret the experience (she and Nixon
still correspond regularly): "I knew that being out there with him
was going to be a seminar the likes of which one could never
attend. I had a real sense of the Shakespearean, dark history that
I was going to be a minor character in."
Her role in that Shakespearean drama caused something of an
uproar at CBS, when, shortly after leaving Nixon in 1978, she was
given a reporter's job by Washington bureau chief William Small.
Several correspondents, including Rather, openly expressed
opposition to her hiring. "Conversations would stop as I entered
the room," she recalls.
Gradually, though, she earned her colleagues' respect. For
several months she labored in relative obscurity, doing legwork on
stories that rarely made it on the air ("They called me queen of
the stakeouts"). Her big chance came after the Three Mile Island
nuclear accident. She broadcast live reports from the damaged
reactor -- borrowing a producer's tennis shoes so she could stand
atop the microwave truck in the rain without slipping off -- and
got her first major exposure on the CBS Evening News. After a stint
covering the 1980 presidential campaign, she was assigned to the
State Department, where she impressed her bosses with her hard work
and excellent sources. Says former CBS News president Richard
Salant: "I think she was the best State Department reporter we ever
had."
During the negotiations to free the Iran hostages, Sawyer's
reports often wound up on the CBS Morning News. "I would sleep all
night on two secretarial chairs so I could get up at 4 a.m., stalk
the halls and see what I could get," she recalls. Her live
exchanges with Charles Kuralt led to her being tapped as the show's
co-anchor, and Sawyer made the leap from journeyman correspondent
to network star.
As co-anchor with Kuralt and later Bill Kurtis, Sawyer helped
boost the ratings for the No. 3-ranked morning show to their
highest levels ever. Colleagues were impressed by her dedication.
"She would show up at 2 o'clock in the morning and write her own
copy," recalls a producer. "This was unheard of. There was no way
you could not respect her." But she soon grew dissatisfied with the
low priority the Morning News was given at the network and with the
trivia she was sometimes forced to handle. "I thought this is not
really what I should be doing," she says. "It was time to move on."
That's when Hewitt came calling with an offer for her to become
60 Minutes' first female correspondent. Joining the old-boy network
of Wallace, Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner and Ed Bradley was not
easy, and reviews of her performance were mixed. Producers found
her, as usual, to be a trouper -- willing to go anywhere, endure
any hardship for a story. "She has a lot of cold blood," says
producer Anne de Boismilon. "You can never feel fear coming from
her." Others, however, grew impatient with her for endlessly
tinkering with stories. "She could drive a producer crazy fixing,
then fixing again and again," says one source. "What she needed was
a baby-sitter to tell her to get on with it."
Outside the office, Sawyer is praised as unfailingly gracious
and generous. When relatives of co-workers are sick, she sends
cards and fruit baskets; her thank-you notes are known for their
eloquence. Her own life-style, meanwhile, is far from extravagant.
In the New York City apartment she occupied while single, "she
preferred no decor," says a close friend. "Basically, what she had
was an awful little table in the living room with a couple of small
couches and some dying plants." Admits Sawyer: "I'm hopeless. I'd
just as soon send out for pizza and sit on pillows in front of the
fire."
Her marriage to Nichols has changed some of that; they are
planning to redecorate their brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East
Side, and they have a house in Connecticut and a ranch in
California. Sawyer is even getting involved in cooking. "She does
it the way she does everything," says Nichols. "She cuts out 35
different versions of the recipe. We do it together. It is very
detailed and sometimes complex." The pair met two years ago on a
Concorde flight from London and went to lunch a couple of times to
discuss doing a profile for 60 Minutes. Nichols finally confessed
that he didn't want to do the piece -- but wanted to keep having
lunch. "All of her is always available all the time," he gushes.
"She uses more of her brain than almost anybody I know."
Sawyer's enthusiasms also run to tennis and movies, and Nichols
has been introducing her to old films on the VCR (her most recent
discovery: Renoir's The Rules of the Game). Nichols sat in on
run-throughs of Sawyer's new ABC show and offered some suggestions
about lighting and blocking. But, says Sawyer, "we're not very good
consultants on each other's careers. We're very good, astute
experts on each other and being happy." Notes a colleague: "She's
like a kid, madly in love for the first time."
Sawyer resists dwelling on such personal matters: it pains her
that her journalistic accomplishments are overshadowed by questions
about her looks, marriage and glamorous life-style. "We're a
Madison Avenue country," she sighs. "I'm not sure that we make a
distinction between newspeople and celebrities. And I think there
is a distinction. The distinction lies in what you do every day --
what you do to get stories and how far you will go and how much you
will dig for them. All of the rest of the attention that comes to
you because you're on the air seems to me an irrelevance."
It is no irrelevance, however, to the executives who pay Sawyer
and her fellow news stars million-dollar salaries and bet entire
prime-time shows on them. Nor is it an irrelevance to the audience
that tunes in, not to watch the nbc Nightly News or a new show
called Prime Time Live, but to see Tom Brokaw or Diane Sawyer or
Connie Chung. This is perhaps the ultimate irony of TV news in the
celebrity age: reporters spend their careers trying to become
stars, only to lament, once they make it, that they are treated as
stars rather than reporters. The complaint may actually be sincere,
but it almost doesn't matter. It's good for the image.
-- Melissa August/Washington, Mary Cronin and William Tynan/New
