Katie Couric recalls radio station manager commenting on her breast size: ‘Can you imagine?’

Key Points

• Katie Couric revisited some of the most blatant, sexist experiences she confronted throughout her career in television news during the latest Call Her Daddy podcast episode.

• “I watched some of the stuff that was going on back then and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I, kind of, came of age in this Mad Men era.’ It wasn’t as bad as it was, exactly,” she told host Alex Cooper.

• Couric recounted an incident when she first began working in broadcast journalist in the ’80s and another while working at celebrity.land.

Katie Couric has always been open about her experiences with the seemingly widespread sexism within the television news industry, especially now, as she looks back on her career with decades of wisdom.

The renowned broadcast journalist revisited some of the most blatant experiences with sexism she confronted during Wednesday’s episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, in which host Alex Cooper asked Couric to recount what it was like as a woman in the earlier days of the industry.

“I graduated from college in 1979 and so I started working in television news in the early ’80s,” Couric recalled to Cooper. “I was an intern at a radio station in Washington and I walked in, I went back to say hello because I was graduating and I was kind of trying to maintain relationships. I wasn’t quite sure what I was gonna do.”

She continued. “And the general manager of the station — I went and said hi, and he said, ‘Are you on the pill?’ And I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He said, ‘Well, your breasts look much bigger than they did last summer.’ Can you imagine?”

Cooper admitted that although she wished she could say otherwise, she could imagine that: “I can imagine, Katie, because these men!”

Couric admitted that she had been “so taken back” by the comment at the time and had been frozen as her “body got hot.”

Just before, Couric told Cooper that she’s been reflecting on that period of her life differently while rewatching Mad Men with her husband, John Molner.

“I watched some of the stuff that was going on back then, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I, kind of, came of age in this Mad Men era.’ It wasn’t as bad as it was, exactly,” she explained.

Couric was reminded of another instance of sexism that she previously recounted in her 2021 memoir, Going There, that occurred during her time at celebrity.land.

“I walked into an executive kind of story meeting, a production meeting in the morning, and I was filling in for the producer who was on vacation,” she recalled. “And I walked in, I don’t know what they’re talking about, but [the executive] said something like, ‘That’s not like Katie. She’s been successful because of her hard work, her writing skills and her breast size.'”

Couric noted that this was said at “a big table surrounded by male executives,” who were all “pretty young because celebrity.land was kind of a bit of a startup back then.”

“And it was just so crazy,” she lamented.

However, Couric found an ally in late anchor Don Farmer, who had been married to fellow broadcast journalist Chris Curle.

“I came back and I was so like flummoxed. I said, ‘This just happened.’ And he said, ‘Sit down. We’re going to write him a memo together,'” Couric remembered with a smile. “And he got on his little Smith Corona typewriter and together we wrote this memo saying, ‘What you said to me was inappropriate, insulting, sexist, and totally unacceptable. I expect an apology immediately. If you do that, we can keep this between us.'”

Couric noted that she wasn’t sure if the company had a human resources department at the time when she would report the situation, so the memo implied that she wouldn’t go to anyone about what happened if there was an apology.

“But how great that my friend Don Farmer said, ‘You do not have to put up with that. We are going to write him this memo,'” she continued. “I don’t think I would have known what to do. And I mean honestly, I am so grateful to him because not only did he help me in that moment, he helped me realize the importance of standing up for yourself. So it was a life lesson that extended way beyond that incident and I really owe him a lot, and I’ve always really been grateful to him for that.”

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Watch Katie Couric’s appearance on Call Her Daddy above.

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