Katie Couric will reportedly leave Yahoo, which has been renamed “Oath” after its merger with Verizon, after she was reportedly offered only a “short-term” contract extension.
Couric had been conducting largely unmemorable interviews online at Yahoo since late 2013. She landed there after tanking spectacularly on two legacy media networks and taking a drastic pay cut as her star kept dimming.
When Couric, the former longtime Today show co-anchor, hosted the CBS Evening News for five years, making a reported $15 million annually, her program routinely finished last among the three broadcast evening news shows.
After she left CBS in 2011, Couric reportedly received $20 million a year from ABC to host a talk show that flopped disastrously. Critics called it an “unmitigated disaster,” and it got cancelled in 2013.
She then reportedly took an initial pay cut to around $6 million a year to go to Yahoo, though many felt that Yahoo was still overpaying for a talent whose value had severely diminished. As CNN noted, Couric was “brought on as Yahoo’s ‘global anchor,'” but her “star faded in the digital space, with many of her interviews going overlooked.”
In 2016, Couric apologized after she was caught red-handed deceptively editing her gun control documentary to make it look like respondents were stumped by her questions about gun control. The Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) filed a $12 million defamation suit in September of 2016, which a district judge later dismissed.
Couric’s co-workers at CBS reportedly despised her, according to Sheila Weller’s The News Sorority. According to the book, Couric implied that Diane Sawyer traded sexual favors for interviews. She is also depicted as someone who was “insensitive to the realities faced by her less well-compensated coworkers.” While she was making $15 million a year at CBS, she did a glamorous photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar when, according to a review of the book, CBS employees were being laid off. Many thought Couric was “was rubbing in her privilege while so many women saw themselves, or their friends, cleaning their desks and saying goodbye.”
Couric will reportedly work on National Geographic documentaries and continue to host her online cooking show with her husband.
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