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Title details for The News Sorority by Sheila Weller - Available

The News Sorority

Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News

by Sheila Weller
Morgan Hallett
Audiobook
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A provocative look at the three remarkable women who revolutionized television broadcast news
For decades, women battered the walls of the male fortress of television journalism, until finally three—Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour—broke through, definitively remaking America’s nightly news. Drawing on exclusive interviews with their colleagues and intimates from childhood on, bestselling author Sheila Weller crafts a lively and eye-opening narrative, revealing the combination of ambition, skill, and character that enabled these three singular women to infiltrate the once impenetrable “boys club” and become cultural icons.
Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Diane Sawyer was a driven, elegant young woman in a time of societal upheaval. Her fierce intellect, almost insuperable work ethic, and mysterious emotional intelligence would catapult Sawyer from being the first female on-air correspondent for 60 Minutes to presenting heartbreaking specials on child poverty in America while anchoring the network flagship, ABC World News Tonight.
Katie Couric, always convenient l y underestimated because of her girl-next-door demeanor, brazened her way through a succession of regional TV news jobs until she finally hit it big in New York. In 1991, Couric became the Today show cohost, where over the next fifteen years she transformed the “female” slot from secondary to preeminent. Couric’s greatest triumph—and most bedeviling challenge—was inheriting the mantle of Walter Cronkite at CBS Evening News, as the first woman ever to anchor a prestigious nighttime network news program.
A glamorous but unorthodox cosmopolite— the daughter of a British Catholic mother and Iranian Muslim father—Christiane Amanpour made a virtue of her outsider status. She joined the fledgling CNN on the bottom rung and then became its “face,” catalyzing its rise to global prominence. Her fearlessness in war zones and before presidents and despots would make her the world’s witness to some of its most acute crises and television’s chief advocate for international justice.
The News Sorority takes us behind the scenes as never before to track Sawyer’s, Couric’s, and Amanpour’s ascendance to the highest ranks of the media elite, showing that the compelling desire to report the news—a drive born of curiosity, empathy, and humanity—must be matched by guts, awesome competitive fervor, and rare strategic savvy.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 30, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780553544664
      • File size: 497795 KB
      • Duration: 17:17:04

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In clear, authoritative tones reminiscent of those that might emanate from a news anchor, narrator Morgan Hallett takes listeners through this account of Sawyer's, Couric's, and Amanpour's struggles to gain just such a seat. Hallett remains fittingly unsentimental yet emotive while narrating the formative moments in the personal lives and careers of these iconic women. Their distinct personalities and career approaches emerge, as do differences in their public and private personas. Weller dishes out enough intrigue, backstabbing, and bad blood for listeners who are looking for them, but she also provides plenty of history, news industry revelations, and insights on women in leadership. Hallett's professional tone reinforces the substantive nature of the book and the women it features. K.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 4, 2014
      This unwieldy triple biography has an ambitious scope and ample shortcomings. The account of the ascents of three powerful women in the male-dominated realm of network news adds to the history of the waning era of conventional broadcasting, but the blend of insider gossip, lists of successful interviews, and often fawning, awkward prose makes it slow going. The Sawyer-Couric professional rivalry is at the heart of the book, and the smoothest narrative of this large work is the story of how Couric beat out Sawyer to become the first solo female anchor of a nightly newscast, CBS’s Evening News, in 2006. There’s glamour aplenty in Amanpour’s cross-cultural background, Couric’s rise to daytime stardom, and Sawyer’s striking presence in her early career and marriage to film director Mike Nichols. As a biographer, Weller (Girls Like Us) never really bridges her distance from her subjects, and she fails to explain the conventions of successful television news until halfway through the book. The best insights come from interviews with the legions of producers, writers and camera people who back up the on-camera talent.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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