Katie Couric dished on being “gaslit” out of interviewing top-notch celebrities Lady Gaga and Hillary Clinton for 60 Minutes. The veteran journalist opened up about her years on the longstanding CBS show on Alex Cooper‘s podcast,”Call Her Daddy.”
Couric spent five years anchoring 60 Minutes, which she described as “sort of my dream.”
“You know, even if I hadn’t been asked to anchor the evening news, I think that would’ve been a great job for me,” she told Cooper. “I love the show.”
But Couric remembers the head of the series not being a huge fan of hers after she’d been brought over from NBC’s the Today show.
Katie Couric spoke with Alex Cooper on the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast.@CallHerDaddy/youtube
“I was sort of seen as somebody from a different network coming in and sort of muddying the waters and I hadn’t come up in the CBS system,” she explained. “So I don’t know, he just didn’t like me.”
The higher-ups’ distaste for Couric made it difficult for her to pitch interview and story ideas that may have brought 60 Minutes into a more modern pop culture conversation.
“I always felt like 60 Minutes was a little behind on like big cultural moments,” she explained. “I said, ‘There’s this incredible singer and I think she’s gonna be the next Madonna. She’s so interesting.'”
“She went to Catholic school, but she’s so outrageous and she’s huge and she’s got, you know, a huge number one song,” Couric remembers pitching. “I think we should do a profile of this person, Lady Gaga.”
Katie Couric recalled her Lady Gaga interview being given to Anderson Cooper.MEGA
The producers quickly rejected her pitch, but one year later, once Lady Gaga had completely skyrocketed, 60 Minutes was ready to interview her.
“And I was like, ‘Okay, well she’s kind of overexposed now.’ She was on the cover of Rolling Stone. She wore meat suits, The Met. She had kinda exploded,” Couric added. “And I thought, you know, wouldn’t it be nice to get somebody right as they’re about to pop instead of a year later?”
Regardless, she offered up the idea to interview the nuns who educated Lady Gaga at Catholic school and dive into the juxtaposition of her upbringing. Producers enthusiastically agreed, only for Couric to be booted from the interview that was her idea in the first place.
“So I was all excited. I went back over and they had a whiteboard at CBS and they had the name of the correspondent and the story next to it,” she explained. “And I see ‘Lady Gaga, Anderson Cooper.'”
‘It Made Me Insane’
Katie Couric recalled an interview with Hillary Clinton being passed off to someone else.MEGA
Couric remembered the same thing happening when the network decided to do an interview with Hillary Clinton, who was the secretary of state at the time.
“I said, ‘That’s awesome. Maybe I can really focus on the work she’s doing for women and girls all around the world,'” she remembered. “Suddenly my producer’s saying, ‘The State Department called, they’re very confused because Scott Pelley and his team were calling about Hillary.'”
“So I go to Jeff Fager and I say, ‘I thought you wanted me to do Hillary. You told me explicitly that you wanted to assign that story to me,'” Couric continued. “And he said, ‘Yeah, we decided to change things up.’ It made me insane.”
“It was sort of a bald-faced lie. And then it was being done behind my back,” she added. “Like, without even the decency to call me and say, ‘Guess what? We decided to reassign the story, and this is why.'”
Katie Couric was the first solo female anchor on a weekday evening news broadcast.MEGA
Couric was, in many ways, a pioneer for female journalists.
The 69-year-old became the first female solo anchor of a weekday evening news broadcast when she began hosting CBS Evening News With Katie Couricin 2005.
Despite her many accolades and successes, while at CBS, she often found herself being looked over in favor of a male anchor.
“Talk about getting gaslit. I mean to me, that is the definition of it,” she said. “And so those were some of the really tough situations I had to deal with when I was there.”
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