Katie Couric Shares Memorable Career Moments on ‘The Women’

Katie Couric is one powerful woman. She was the first female anchor on the CBS Nightly News, and before that, she took the Today Show to dominant ratings for 15 years. Her insightful and sometimes very hard-hitting interviews of everyone from Barack Obama and Sarah Palin to Shakira and Denzel Washington have made her one of the most admired and successful names in news. Rose Reed, host of The Women, sits down with this powerhouse to talk memorable moments in her career, how she’s managed the sexism in the news industry, her personal life and significant losses, and even get some great insider tips on how and when to lob those hardball questions, one interviewer to another.

Though Katie has reported in some extremely difficult times – watching live when the planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, on the ground during the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia – she acknowledges that this pandemic is different. “These were explosive events with a beginning, a middle, and an end,” she says. “The fact that we’re learning about this virus in real time...we don’t know how long this will take. We don’t know if things will ever return to ‘normal.’” She compares it more with “the scourge of white supremacy and the networks of racism and anti-Semitism in our country:” more difficult to predict, harder to present solutions for. But, she says, “I consider journalism, and translating what’s going on in the world, asking questions, speaking truth to power, as a calling and as a public service.”

Katie recalls a few of her powerful interviews with David Duke, Laura Bush, and with families of Columbine victims, how differently they had to be conducted and approached. With David Duke, “I really held his feet to the fire,” she says, reading him some of his own words and asking him to explain his thinking. With the Columbine families, she remembers that NBC decided to blow off the commercial breaks “because they could see something really profound was unfolding.” But when she got Laura Bush to support Roe v. Wade in an interview, the Bush White House said she was “badgering her;” her co-anchor, Matt Lauer, got all the White House assignments after that. “There’s so much forgiveness when a man takes you to task,” she says, where women are always navigating an unconscious bias expecting her to be warm and likable in all situations. “Sometimes we have to be firm and say, ‘No, I don’t like that,’ and people have a hard time hearing that from a woman still,” she says. “I think the way to change that paradigm is to see more women in important, decision-making positions.” Hear more from the venerable Katie Couric on this episode of The Women.

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