Katie Couric criticized Diane Sawyer in her new memoir, saying she was so desperate to beat her in the morning TV wars that she declared of her rival, “That woman needs to be stopped.”
This message was even put on a pillow for Couric by a “Today” colleague, she wrote in the soon-to-be-published book, “Going There,” which isn’t due until October, but was obtained by The Post.
In her sensational story about her decades in killer TV news, Couric, 64, admitted that the competition between them got out of hand at one point.
“I loved getting under Diane’s skin,” she writes, though she freely admits that Sawyer got under hers as well.
Couric spared nothing as she discussed all of her former co-stars, including Matt Lauer and Deborah Norville, in addition to the producers who helped her achieve fame, as well as celebrities such as Prince Harry and Martha Stewart.
But she’s saving special venom for former “Good Morning America” anchor Sawyer, 75, who she says was all she wasn’t — tall, blonde, with a voice “full of money.”
Couric wrote that her former rival Sawyer portrayed herself as a devoted family woman to score an interview with kidnapped teens, Jacqueline Marris and Tamara Brooks.
But Couric’s booker eventually won the interview back by pointing out that Sawyer was a stepmother and Couric a widow of two young girls.
She also labels Sawyer’s infamous interview with Whitney Houston as almost exploitative, adding: “There was a very fine line between a revealing interview and the exploitation of troubled, often traumatized people in the service of tasteless tidbits and sensational sound bites (e.g. Diane who took on an excited Whitney Houston about eating disorders and drug use, which resulted in the momentous comeback ‘crack is whack’).”
While Little, Brown and Company described the book, which will be out on October 26, to The Post as “heartwarming, hilarious and very honest,” it gets cheeky at times.
For example, when Sawyer scored a major interview with a woman who had given birth to twins at age 57, Couric pondered, “I wonder who she had to suck to get that.”
Although it was a joke, she said it didn’t seem that way when it hit the papers.
“I’m pretty sure I speak for Diane when I say neither of us ever resorted to actual fellatio to land an interview,” she wrote, “but we were both concerned with the metaphorical kind — flattering gatekeepers, relatives, and who else stood in the way of a great profit.”
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