Katie Couric is opening up about the challenging environment she navigated as a correspondent for the news program “60 Minutes” over two decades ago. The 69-year-old journalist and founder of Katie Couric Media detailed her experiences regarding stories being reassigned to male reporters during an episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, which premiered on June 24.
Couric told host Alex Cooper that the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Jeff Fager, “just didn’t like me.” She suggested that Fager may not have been properly consulted regarding her hiring and felt she was complicating matters by maintaining connections with a different network. During her tenure at the program, which ran alongside her role anchoring “CBS Evening News” from 2006 to 2011, Couric pitched a profile on an emerging Lady Gaga, predicting her rise to stardom. While Fager initially declined the idea, he expressed interest a year later. Although Couric had her angle about the singer’s Catholic school education approved, she later discovered at the studio that she would not be helming the feature.
“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,” Couric stated. Cooper’s interview with Gaga eventually aired in February 2011. Couric remarked that the situation was frustrating, noting that a similar incident occurred regarding Hillary Clinton. Despite Fager previously instructing her to sit down with the former Secretary of State, Couric discovered the State Department was receiving contradictory information about who was leading the interview. When she confronted Fager, he claimed they decided to change the approach, eventually assigning the piece to Scott Pelley, which aired in May 2010.
Couric expressed deep frustration that these decisions were made behind her back, stating that Fager lacked the professional decency to inform her of the reassignments. “Talk about getting gaslit,” she added. Fager served as the executive producer of “60 Minutes” from 2004 to 2018 and was also chairman of CBS News starting in 2011. He was terminated in 2018 following allegations of inappropriate behavior and sending threatening messages to a staffer, claims which he denied. Couric is not the only correspondent to report such issues, as former colleague Meredith Vieira also previously alleged experiencing sexism at CBS.
The landscape at “60 Minutes” has shifted significantly since that era. As of this year, neither Pelley nor Cooper is part of the reporting staff, with Pelley recently dismissed following internal conflicts at the network. Numerous other staffers, including executive editor Draggan Mihailovich and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, have also exited the program, while Cooper concluded his two-decade run on the show this past May.
