TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080789/08078900.001

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                                                                                VIDEO, Page 46

COVER STORY: Star Power


Diane Sawyer, with a new prime-time show and a $1.6 million
contract, is hot. But are celebrity anchors like her upstaging
the 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
  York