Katie Couric began a feud with Sunny Hostin on today’s episode of The View over “distortions” in Couric’s highly awaited novel Going There.
Couric’s book has made headlines ahead of its Oct. 26 release due to her admissions about not being overtly friendly to rival women at NBC, willingly cutting damning quotes from a Ruth Bader Ginsburg interview to “protect” her, and the current state of her relationship with disgraced anchor Matt Lauer.
Couric opened her appearance on The View by claiming that the book isn’t as “provocative” as some have claimed, to which Hostin replied, “It kind of is.”
“To me, it’s been distorted, cherry picked, and rewritten in a way that, to me, bears very little resemblance to what I wrote,” Couric argued. “And it’s been fascinating… to see people who haven’t read the book write and comment about it. I think that says a lot about our current culture.”
Hostin pointed out that people may find Going There provocative because they previously knew the media personality as “the girl next door.” She also brought up Couric’s admission that in the past, she’s viewed other women in the male-dominated broadcast journalism field as her competition.
“I think if you actually read that section, which is a paragraph, I said there were times where I felt territorial,” Couric shot back. “I think almost every woman or man in this very competitive job has felt that way at one time or another. So I felt it was very honest of me to say I was plagued by those feelings, especially when there were very few positions for women at the time.”
Couric’s decision to write about ex-coworkers Deborah Norville and Ashleigh Banfield, both of whom have openly said that their feelings were hurt by her comments, was also brought up by Hostin. Couric, who presented Today from 1991 until 2006, succeeded Norville, who had previously held the role. Couric discusses the Today audience’s “residual nasty sentiments” against former co-host Norville after she took over for longtime presenter Jane Pauley in the early 1990s in Going There, according to the Daily Mail. Norville, she continued, had a “severe relatability problem” as well as a “relentless perfectionism” that viewers disliked.
“I’m really too stunned and, frankly, hurt to comment,” Norville said in a statement about Couric’s comments to the New York Post.
“First of all, if you read the book, I say Deborah was sunny…
incredible hardworking, thrust into a homewrecker narrative through no fault of her own,” Couric said on The View. She added that viewers’ anger at Norville for replacing Pauley was misdirected, and that the men in charge of the show at that time miscalculated viewer loyalty.
“I sent Deborah a book, and I think when she reads it in its totality, she’s gonna see that I was highly complimentary of her,” Couric concluded.
On ABC, The View airs weekdays at 11 p.m./10 p.m. Watch a snippet from today’s programme by scrolling up.
