Katie Couric still remembers “getting gaslit” by CBS and “60 Minutes” over high-profile interviews with Lady Gaga and Hillary Clinton.
While talking with Alex Cooper on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Couric recalled pitching an interview with Lady Gaga before she truly blew up, confident she’d be the next big thing. She was turned down. Then a year later, she was told they wanted to do a story on Gaga — after she had blown up.
Couric wished they’d done it before she started getting overexposed, but had ideas and was excited about it.
“‘Maybe we could talk to the nuns who educated her at Sacred Heart and kind of talk about this juxtaposition of her background in education and this outrageous singer she’s become.’ So they said, ‘Great.’ So I was all excited,” Couric said. “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. And I see ‘Lady Gaga, Anderson Cooper.’ And I was like — it made me crazy. But that happened again with Hillary Clinton.”
She continued: “Jeff Fager, the executive producer, said, ‘Katie, we want you to do a profile of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.’ I said, ‘That’s awesome. Maybe I can really focus on the work she’s doing for women and girls all around the world.’ 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.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, we decided to change things up.’ It made me insane.”
Watch Couric’s full “Call Her Daddy” interview below:
Couric and Cooper both agreed that it would be infuriating to have ideas, either pitch them or be pitched them, and then after agreeing to them having a decision-maker pivot into a new direction. The former “Today” host said she felt gaslit by the company.
“It was sort of a bald-faced lie,” Couric concluded. “And then it was being done behind my back. Without even the decency to call me and say, ‘Guess what? We decided to reassign the story and this is why.’ Instead I have to find out because the State Department spokesperson tells my producer. So like, stuff like that was, you know, talk about getting gaslit. I mean, to me, that is the definition of it. And so those were some of the really tough situations I had to deal with when I was there.”
Couric’s comments are just the latest in a long line of her recent dings against CBS and “60 Minutes.” The show and organization has come under fire after new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss terminated a number of correspondents at “60 Minutes” including mainstay Scott Pelley. He was fired after publicly disagreeing with the way the show was being run.
Couric lamented earlier this year that Weiss has “eroded and really destroyed” the storied news network.
