Katie Couric: Sexism, Storytelling & Standing Up to Cancer
with Katie Couric
24 Jun 20265 min read1h 05m
TL;DR
Katie Couric recounts being told by the president of CNN at age 22 that he 'never wanted to see her on air again,' and explains how that rejection pushed her to grind through local news, cover the Pentagon, and arrive at the Today show fully seasoned. She also describes anchoring live through 9/11 with shaking hands, calling her parents near the Pentagon mid-broadcast, and the internal sabotage she faced at CBS — including story ideas being credited to other correspondents on a whiteboard without warning.
Key Moments
Katie Couric
“and I remember my hand was shaking and I also remember Matt saying this is an act of terrorism that whole day was spent you know just it got worse and worse and then the plane you know crashing in Shanksville and the it was just terrible”
Katie describing the moment the second plane hit the World Trade Center while she was live on the Today show on September 11, 2001.
“I ran into our production area and I called my parents. And my mom and dad at the time, they've they've since passed away, but they lived in northern Virginia not far from the Pentagon. And I remember calling them and telling them to get in the basement.”
Katie revealing that during a brief break from anchoring on 9/11 she slipped off set to call her parents, who lived near the Pentagon, out of fear.
“he called and said he never wanted to see you on the air again.”
Katie recounting what assignment editor Bill Henzel told her after her very first on-air report at CNN, relaying the verdict of CNN president Reese Schonfeld.
“Samantha said, 'If I listened to what every bitch in New York City said about me, I'd never leave the house.'”
Katie recounting how her then-10-year-old daughter Carrie quoted Sex and the City to pull her out of a tearful breakdown at the dinner table over the pressure of anchoring the CBS Evening News.
Katie describing the moment she walked into CBS and saw on the whiteboard that the Lady Gaga story — her own pitch — had been reassigned to Anderson Cooper without anyone telling her.
Katie Couric is one of the most celebrated journalists in American television history, best known as the first woman to solo anchor a major evening news broadcast when she joined CBS Evening News in 2006. She spent 15 years as co-anchor of NBC's Today show and has interviewed everyone from world leaders to pop icons. Beyond journalism, Couric is a prominent cancer awareness advocate following the loss of her husband Jay Monahan to colon cancer, and has authored a memoir about her remarkable career.
Takeaways
1
Workplace gaslighting can look like reassigned story credits Couric pitched both Lady Gaga and Hillary Clinton stories at 60 Minutes, was explicitly assigned the Clinton piece by executive producer Jeff Fager, then discovered via a State Department spokesperson calling her confused producer that Scott Pelley's team had taken it over. Fager simply said they 'decided to change things up.' Couric names this pattern explicitly as gaslighting — being told one thing and quietly having it undone without explanation.
2
Rejection can be reframed as readiness feedback When Reese Schonfeld banned Couric from CNN's air at 22, she didn't quit — she asked herself what the experienced people around her had that she lacked, and answered: repetitions. She went to local news, covered crime in Miami, interviewed celebrities in Atlanta, and arrived at the Today show with 10,000 hours behind her. The setback functioned as a forcing function for the seasoning she would have skipped.
3
Live anchoring 9/11 meant processing trauma in real time Couric describes having 'magical thinking' in the first minutes — assuming a heart attack caused the first plane impact, the same way a smaller plane had once hit the Empire State Building. She notes she didn't process what happened for days, going straight from the Today show to anchoring the evening news with Brian Williams that night. The story illustrates how professional composure can entirely defer emotional reckoning.
4
Preparedness signals safety and builds interview trust Couric tells Cooper that preparation is the single most important quality an interviewer can have, because it signals to the subject that 'this person isn't just kind of sitting down — they've done their homework.' That sense of being seen makes guests more willing to open up. The practical implication: depth of research is a hospitality act, not just a professional one.
5
Being a trailblazer means absorbing institutional resistance alone Couric says she was brought to CBS Evening News explicitly to modernize the format, but the traditional audience and internal staff resisted both the changes and her personally. She faced naysayers and people she describes as actively trying to sabotage her, while publicly absorbing all criticism for editorial decisions made above her pay grade. The 'trailblazer gets burned' dynamic is a concrete cost of being first that rarely gets named.
6
Collective storytelling is how communities survive shared trauma Couric observes that throughout her career people who have experienced something horrible are often 'almost anxious to come on and talk about it,' and connects this to storytelling's oldest function: validating a life lost and breaking isolation. Both she and Cooper reflect that self-isolating with trauma causes rumination, while sharing it publicly 'honors it.' This frames journalism's emotional role beyond information delivery.