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Couric recounts journalistic career for UB audience
By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
Katie Couric opened UB's 16th annual Distinguished Speaker Series on Friday with a quick jab at the Bill's defense and praise for Buffalo favorites like the Anchor Bar's suicidal wings and Cole's beef on weck.
COURIC
Couric, host of NBC's "Today" show, was at turns self-effacing, funny and moving as she recounted her career as a broadcast journalist and the loss of her husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer and her sister, Emily, to pancreatic cancer.
Couric, who has covered nearly every notable news event—from the invasions of Panama and Iraq to the Columbine shootings—said her job on "Today" is arguably one of the best jobs in television.
"It's the best class in world history I could ever take," she said.
She credits Buffalo native Tim Russert, moderator of "Meet the Press" and senior vice president and Washington bureau chief for NBC News, for giving her the career break that eventually propelled her into anchoring a major news show.
"Tim was a terrific early booster of my career. It's proof that it only takes one person to believe in you and be in your corner." Russert hired Couric as deputy Pentagon correspondent in the summer of 1989.
She said she went from a "Leave it to Beaver" childhood in Arlington, Va., to interviewing—and sometimes taking to task—some of the most notable and notorious people of the past two decades, including talking with Howard Stern and Yassar Arafat on the same day.
Couric, who said her first live-take reporting on the president for CNN in the early 1980s "was a disaster," but that her time with the then-fledgling news network proved to be "like four years at the best graduate school in the country." Since then, she has braved an on-camera colonoscopy before a network audience to demystify the exam for viewers, winning a coveted George Foster Peabody Award in 2001 for that series on colon cancer that aired on "Today" in March 2000.
During one of many humorous moments, the nearly 4,000-strong audience roared when Couric delivered a dead-on imitation of Ross Perot, who, she said, "barked at her like a fourth-grade teacher," exclaiming "Katie, Katie, Katie," every time she asked questions he didn't like during what she billed as "her least favorite interview."
As she reflected on her career, Couric said it's the ordinary people who do extraordinary things that impact her most—from parents talking about their missing child on national television to a woman's determination to fully recover from burns over 80 percent of her body received when the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.
"These are the moments I feel so grateful to celebrate humanity," she said.
She said the defining moment of her career came during an impromptu, 1992 interview with former President George Bush during a tour of the White House hosted by then First Lady Barbara Bush. The unplanned, unrehearsed interview went on for 20 minutes, providing Couric with the opportunity to "think on her feet."
"It showed me that I didn't need prepared questions to elicit good, solid answers," she said. "It gave me a lot of self-confidence."