MONDAY, JUNE 28, 2010
KLMNO Diane Sawyer, subtly reshaping ABC’s ‘World News’ media notes from C1
S
C3 MUSIC REVIEW
A youthful orchestra’s enjoyable summer fling
NOI Philharmonic blossoms briefly once a year for a short season
by Anne Midgette One of D.C.’s best orchestras
JENNIFER S. ALTMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
FEEDBACK FOR REPORTERS:Sawyer is “constantly pushing us to ask the next question,” her executive producer says. media notes from C1
MEDIA NOTES
before Christmas, and her changes to the newscast have been slow and subtle. She has brief, unscripted exchanges with her reporters, and “World News” often shows them at their desks or interviewing people on the phone, rather than in traditional stand-ups. “Jon Karl sitting in front of a computer saying, ‘But it’s right here on Page 4,078,’ tells you many things,” says Sawyer, recalling the reporter citing a provision of the health-care legislation. “It’s a way of showing that what we’re doing is not mysterious.” Sitting up stiffly, Sawyer
explains: “I know our correspondents have long felt the formality of what we do — ‘This is what it is, back to you, thank you, turn’ — doesn’t allow us to question things the way people at home question them.” Karl says Sawyer gives him constant feedback and urged him, on the health bill, to “dive into that thing and show us where it is and what you have found. . . . She has helped make me a better reporter. She has great antennae for questions that cut to the chase.”
As 13 people crowd into a small conference room for last Tuesday’s 9 a.m. editorial meeting, Sawyer runs the show, offering a string of suggestions for each story idea. Staffers sometimes lean in because she speaks so softly. On the uproar over
McChrystal, whom Sawyer has interviewed, she invokes the audience: “We need to tell you who he is, we really do.” On the rollout of health-care
reform: “I wonder if we don’t also owe the viewer, given the maze of what passed, something concrete: How many of us have put our 26-year-olds on our insurance? . . . I just feel it’s still a blur.”
On Illinois requiring state
workers to turn 67 before getting retirement benefits: “I wonder if we’re ending up with a de facto increase in the retirement age in this country.” The anchor disappears into
her office for 15 minutes and reemerges as the Diane Sawyer you see on the screen: perfectly coiffed blond hair, powdered pink face, smart blue blouse. Back at her desk, the talk turns to a profile of Nikki Haley, the Indian American favored to win that night’s GOP gubernatorial primary in South Carolina. “Tell me what it means to be Sikh,” Sawyer says.
She pores over the Rolling Stone article, highlighting passages with a yellow marker. Then she heads upstairs for a
phone interview with the Rolling Stone reporter, Michael Hastings, which lasts for 25 minutes even though it will at most yield a sound bite for the newscast. With a camera rolling in a
darkened control room, Sawyer conducts the impromptu interview without notes: “Did he assume any of this was off the record? . . . Do you think he was deliberately taking a risk borne of frustration? . . . Are you saying McChrystal was drunk?” There is, for Sawyer, a personal
aspect to this story: McChrystal groaned about not wanting to open e-mails from special Mideast envoy Richard Holbrooke, who is her former boyfriend. Sawyer recalls Holbrooke as “brave” and “inexhaustible,” adding: “I don’t know how to explain to people how we can have a personal connection to someone and still be a reporter. They either think we’re lying or we’re automatons.”
Since taking over the anchor
chair, Sawyer has held on to nearly all of Gibson’s audience. She has averaged 7.6million viewers, compared with 8.8 million for Brian Williams’s “NBC Nightly News” and 5.8 million for Couric’s “CBS Evening News.” “I am deeply frustrated by that,” Banner says, adding that promotion has been so meager that he meets people who still think Sawyer is co-hosting “Good Morning America.” “I more than anything want to get back into first place. It’s something she deserves.” In the past month, Sawyer has reduced NBC’s lead to 710,000 viewers. After the national hazing that Couric received, Sawyer’s status as the second full-time female network anchor seems to be a non-issue. “The joy is that we can be individuals and different, and yes, being a woman is one of those things I am, for sure. And I hope it informs what I think about,” the Kentucky native says, twisting the ring on her finger as if the question is an unwelcome distraction. Her baptism of fire came in
January when she was reporting in Afghanistan and had to make a 30-hour journey to Haiti to cover the devastating earthquake there. She says her seven trips as anchor have energized her, that she needs to be at the scene of a story “and know what it smells like.”
When Sawyer went to
Louisiana after the gulf oil spill, “I was so moved by the valor of these fishermen and their families and how much they wanted to go out and protect their land.” She says her
husband, director Mike Nichols, jokingly calls her “Wilderness Heroine,” because she’d “pack a little bag and go off to a jungle in the Amazon.” The anchor keeps inviting
viewers to send e-mail queries about the spill and reads the answers her staff has gotten — some of them from BP — on the air. In regular updates, she has chided officials for being unable to say “how much coastline has been hit by oil.” Sawyer now gets to sleep until
7 a.m., her old starting time during 11 years at “GMA,” but doesn’t turn in until 1 or 2 a.m. Nearly everyone has a story about her stamina. In April, having learned of a
West Virginia mine collapse shortly before the evening news, Sawyer and correspondent David Muir flew there on a charter, landing just before midnight. “So which end of the county are you going to take?” Sawyer asked Muir, who recalls meeting up with her again just before her 7 a.m. live shot for “GMA.” They continued working throughout the day, and when “World News” came on, Muir says, “a lot of people didn’t realize that this was an anchorwoman who hadn’t slept.” Sawyer, who once worked in
Washington — as a White House press aide for Richard Nixon — has been using her trips to the capital to get better acquainted with the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Obama adviser David Axelrod.
Despite her superstar status at ABC and CBS, Sawyer admits she feels the extra weight of the anchor mantle. In her eyes, she is carrying on the tradition of Peter Jennings and Gibson, of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. When she comes on the air after a presidential speech, “it’s the network signaling to you that this moment matters.”
Sawyer serves as coach, cheerleader and air traffic controller, trying to clear the runway for maximum information traffic. In the conference room at 2:40, she says she will talk to George Stephanopoulos about McChrystal “and then turn to Martha [Raddatz], who knows him so well, and say tell us more.” Sawyer still wants answers on the oil spill: “Did anything pan out on the oxygen deprivation of the ocean?”
But she sounds equally
fascinated by a health research group threatening to sue McDonald’s for luring kids with Happy Meal toys. “If you put a McDonald’s wrapper on Mom’s cheeseburger, they think it’s
better?” Sawyer looks at the script: “I wonder if we have to move up the saturated fat and calories.” Sawyer’s whispery, more emotional delivery isn’t everyone’s cup of tea — “There’s a lady-of-the-manor air about her,” aUSA Today critic wrote — but it is distinctive. “She doesn’t have the voice of God in her,” Banner says, casting it as an asset. Her storytelling ability, honed as a “60 Minutes” correspondent, is equally valuable. She jogs upstairs to look at video for a story about the 8-year-old son of the late professor Randy Pausch, asking Congress to boost funding for pancreatic cancer research. Sawyer, who once did an hour- long special on Pausch and clearly admires him, asks the producer for more evocative pictures of his children. Ducking into a sound booth, she changes the script on the fly as she records it. Sawyer is quickly pulled into a
meeting with her medical unit, where she methodically challenges each story pitch: “Who are you considering elderly for these purposes?” “What’s the average length of a doctor’s appointment, 11 minutes or so?” “I love that, but we have to figure out how to do it . . . so it’s not ‘GMA.’ ” With two hours till airtime,
Sawyer looks at White House correspondent Jake Tapper’s script on McChrystal, blue pen in hand. “Rather than have Jake say he bad-mouthed Obama, include the text so people can decide how bad it is,” she tells Banner. At 6:30, Sawyer leads the broadcast with the McChrystal saga: “Good evening. There was a giant explosion heard around the world today, and it had nothing to do with weapons, everything to do with words.” The interview with Rolling Stone’s Hastings gets two sentences; the rest is posted online as part of Sawyer’s “Conversation” series. Sawyer covers the oil spill, the Nikki Haley race and the McDonald’s flap and ends with the legacy of Randy Pausch. “A singular man and his extraordinary son,” she says before signing off. Sawyer is attached to her
favorite blips of information, tucking them away in a file. She recalls Louisiana fishermen telling her that shrimp have “these little tails, the things you leave on the plate, that propel them away from the oil. It moved me very much, their relationship to these little creatures we think of as brainless.” She has tried in vain to get this on the air and vows to succeed one day. “Until then,” Sawyer says, glancing at the staff outside her office, “I will be roundly mocked and ridiculed.”
kurtzh@washpost.com
General violated protocol . . . and presidential code mcchrystal from C1
marginalized him, an enraged Taylor ran for president in 1848 as a Whig and won. Gen. George S. Patton’s run-
ning off at the mouth to report- ers caused constant headaches for Franklin D. Roosevelt. When Patton smacked around shell- shocked troops in the presence of reporters, they huddled and agreed not to publish that infor- mation so as not to hurt the war effort. They did, however, spread the word through private Army channels. Ultimately, radio re- porter Drew Pearson broke the story and helped cause Patton’s downfall.
“Douglas MacArthur used his media connections effectively when he was essentially the em- peror of Japan,” said Brian Linn,
a military historian at Texas A&M University. MacArthur would get angry when the Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper didn’t feature him prominently enough and would excise the names of his subordinates from military statements to empha- size his role. The ego that the me- dia helped feed led to an act of insubordination that prompted President Harry S. Truman to re- lieve the general of his duty. “Since the dawn of the modern information era,” said Robert Ci- tino, a professor at the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, “the media and generalship have gone hand in hand.” McChrystal seemed at first to
have followed in the footsteps of Gen. David H. Petraeus, who has demonstrated a clear under-
standing of how Washington and the media work and how to culti- vate an image that increases your political leverage. (An interview Petraeus gave to Reuters this week was headlined “The War- rior-Scholar Versus the Taliban,” and the positive story about the “rising star” included a quote from Petraeus referencing his Princeton pedigree, his jumping out of airplanes and his decision- making capabilities, all in one sentence.) Then came McChrystal’s trip
to Paris that coincided with the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull, which closed down Europe’s airspace, prompt- ing a bus trip to Berlin and a nearly week-long stay at the Ritz- Carlton. Then came the tourist- trap boozing and insubordinate smack talk.
McChrystal allowed Rolling
Stone’s Michael Hastings to join his team all the way, and the re- porter witnessed a general far away from Washington and the Obama ethic. Washington rules — don’t leave fingerprints on at- tacks against your political en- emies, don’t confide in reporters who don’t depend on you for their beats, drink a single malt scotch and not a case of citrus- flavored lager — didn’t apply. The president has all but guar- anteed that this won’t happen again by turning to Petraeus. “Petraeus is a savvy person,”
said John McManus, a military historian at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “He is able to use the media to cultivate the image that he wants.”
horowitzj@washpost.com
B THEATRE B
“Shrieks of laughter night after night.” -TheWashington Post
Added Shows: Thu. July 1 at 2PM
played its last concert of the sea- son on Saturday night. Too bad it convenes only once a year. Each summer, the National Orchestral Insitute at the Uni- versity of Maryland draws young players between 18 and 28 from around the country — and raves from critics. The pro- gram involves an intense month of coaching with a starry as- sortment of faculty members from prestigious or- chestras (it would be great to hear the faculty play together as an or- chestra sometime) and performances with not- ed conductors. Miguel Harth-Bedoya, music director of the Fort Worth Symphony, to whose name the adjec- tive “rising” is usually appended, led Saturday. It’s easy to love a youth or-
chestra: The stereotype, which tends to be true, is that the kids, loving the music and full of hope and ambition, have an edge over professional orches- tras struggling with routine. Whatever worries one may have for the future of classical music, there appear to be more and more young musicians able to play better and better on a tech- nical level. Put these factors to- gether and you get the kind of sound heard Saturday: confi- dent, unified and downright vo- luptuous, with chocolatey cellos and sinuous clarinets.
Some of the sensuousness had to do with the program, large works that wallow in the sound an orchestra is able to make: Brahms’s Third Sympho- ny and Elgar’s “Enigma” Varia- tions, separated by Jennifer Higdon’s oft-performed “blue cathedral,” which perhaps wal- lows less than it stretches itself exultantly out over the massed forces on stage. All three pieces represent active orchestral workouts with lots of solo op- portunities. Between the con- certmaster’s gutsy, tough violin in the Higdon, the mellifluous principal viola in the Elgar, and several other notable turns,
DANCE REVIEW A revolutionary remembered
The magic of an Isadora Dun- can dance lies in its simplicity. Rarely more than a few minutes in length and always built on basic, uncontrived movements, her century-old dances have an emotional clarity and an artistic fearlessness that remain rel- evant today. Eleven of the modern dance
pioneer’s works were revived Saturday night at Dance Place in Word Dance Theater’s “Revo- lutionary! Isadora Duncan.” In- terspersed were monologues by actress Sarah Pleydell, who played Duncan. These scenes proved an un- forced way of putting Duncan’s works in context, casting light on her philosophy of dance and her roller coaster of a personal life. And Pleydell ably captured her strong-willed and rebellious spirit.
The dances, — skips, hops and runs — were at their best in the hands of Cynthia Word, ar- tistic director. She delivered the steps with the natural, unstud- ied grace Duncan was known for.
She shined in “Ave Maria,” a
solo set to the Schubert score by the same name. For most of the dance, her feet remained plant- ed and the only movements were slow tilts of the head and deliberate, unhurried lifts and drops of the arms. To take such spare, minimal movement and imbue it with emotional inten- sity is a major triumph. The other performers didn’t consistently dance with the lightness that these works call for, and sometimes vestiges of other styles of training could be seen in their movement. — Sarah Halzack
Harth-Bedoya
there was no need to miss the presence of a featured soloist. Harth-Bedoya emphasized the sensuousness, too: caress- ing the music with his hands, inflating it with wide embraces of his arms, never quite leaving it alone even when a soloist might have managed equally well with less massaging. From him, one wanted a little less sensuality and a little more rig- or: The Brahms, particularly, was slightly undifferentiated in its dynamic, tending to be ei- ther kind-of quiet or kind-of loud, and there were a few hints of sluggishness. Still, he and the players were able to access thrilling energy in the fast parts, and the last movement sizzled. In Elgar’s famous “Nim- rod” variation, he held the music to a tiny thread of pianissimo, pregnant with antici- pation, and let the sound gradually rise and grow and blos- som. It was a beautiful example of the effec- tiveness of quiet play- ing. Higdon, who won
this year’s Pulitzer Prize, is a re- assuring figure for audiences who think they don’t like con- temporary music. They tend to be happily surprised by her ef- fective use of the orchestra in pieces that are strong and ap- pealing without being aggres- sive about their artistic agenda. “Blue cathedral,” according to her Web site, has been played by more than 200 orchestras since its premiere in 2000. It does ev- erything a classical piece is sup- posed to do by taking listeners on a journey of sound toward a majestic though unstated goal, while stopping to examine things along the way: now giv- ing little licks of bells or struck metal, now raising individual melodies over a gentle texture created by having man of the players shake Chinese reflex balls, creating a quiet tapestry of sound like falling rain. The National Orchestral In- stitute is also devoted to explor- ing different perspectives on performance. At the end of in- termission, the brass section as- sembled on a balcony of the lob- by of the Clarice Smith Center and offered a short piece: a nice way to refocus the audience af- ter the break and gently draw them back inside.
midgettea@washpost.com
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