A few hours before our interview, Norah O’Donnell decides to sleep in…until 6 a.m. This is new for her—the notion that she might be able to wake up around the same time as the rest of us, and she hasn’t quite adjusted. For the better part of a decade, O’Donnell cohosted CBS This Morning and rose at what is for most people the middle of the night.
Next week she shifts gears—and schedules. O’Donnell is about to take her seat in the anchor chair at CBS Evening News, making her the second woman ever to solo-anchor the broadcast. Katie Couric held the position from 2006 to 2011. (Connie Chung coanchored the program, with Dan Rather, from 1993 to 1995.)
Her move comes at a time when trust in the news is at an all-time low and, thanks to mobile alerts, social media, and a host of other distractions, there have never been more opportunities to avoid what was once appointment television for most American families. (Even so, the three major news broadcasts still command upwards of 20 million viewers a night.) In both respects, O’Donnell has her work cut out for her, and she knows it. “The evening broadcast has to change,” she insists. “We are now living in a time when we already get the headlines on our phone. So how do we provide context and depth?”
“By 6:30 p.m. at night, we know what happened,” she says. “How can we explain why it happened? I think people are hungry for and craving a trusted source of unbiased, fact-based news. And that is our standard. And that’s, quite frankly, the brand of CBS already.”
Still, O’Donnell’s ascent is at once evidence of a new era at the network—which has started to recover from the exits of Charlie Rose, Leslie Moonves, and 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager, who all stepped down amid sexual misconduct and gender discrimination claims—and an obvious next step. She has covered Congress, six presidential campaigns, and the White House. She’s interviewed half a dozen presidents and has stared down hurricanes, a red-faced Bill O’Reilly, and other natural disasters on live television.
So of course, it’s nice that a woman got the job this go-round. But as usual, it’s also about time.
Ahead of her first night in the same seat that famed anchor Walter Cronkite once occupied, O’Donnell spoke to Glamour about her ambitions for the show, how she found her voice in journalism, and what a person does when she misses a call from Oprah.
Glamour: I’ve heard your first anchor gig came at age 10. Is that true? And if so, I want to hear all about it.
Norah O’Donnell: That’s true. My first anchor job was when I was 10 years old, in Seoul, South Korea. My father was a colonel in the U.S. Army, and we were deployed to Seoul. We lived on the Yong Song army base for two years. It’s a tight-knit community, and a friend of my mother’s said, “Hey, I know about this opportunity,” because children in South Korea were required to learn English at a young age, and they were looking for people to make audiotapes and to do an English program on a station that was sort of the equivalent to a PBS.
That became my first job, essentially anchoring an English-learning program once a week on Korean television. I got a small paycheck every week, and I’d go get Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie tapes. That was the beginning. I’ll never forget it. “Penny Lover“ by Lionel Ritchie was my favorite song.
I think a lot of people, and women in particular, remember what it feels like to get paid for the first time. Was that part of it memorable—earning a check?
It was my first job, and I grew up in a military family. We were four kids, and my parents didn’t give me money to go buy whatever I wanted. If I wanted something, I had to have a job. So work was important to me because it gave me independence. From age 10 on, I’ve had a job.
Were news and journalism important to your parents?
Because we lived overseas, we always paid attention to the news in my house. We always read the newspaper. My father was a doctor, so we always had medical journals lying around, also Time and Newsweek. We always watched the news at night. And I think, really, because of my parents’ reverence and respect for journalism, that exposed me to that world.
The first and most powerful woman I saw on television was Barbara Walters. I didn’t realize this until recently, but a friend of mine in Texas, her mom said, “You always used to imitate Barbara Walters. You would call up on the phone and leave messages and say you were Barbara Walters and that you wanted an interview.”
You’ve spent the bulk of your career as a reporter, covering a host of presidential elections. Then you jumped to CBS This Morning. You’ve talked before about how that helped you find a voice of your own on television. What was that process like? What did it feel like as a journalist to exercise that muscle?
I think the hallmark of great journalism is listening. But certainly, in the past decade, what I’ve realized is the power of my own voice and the power to choose the type of stories that we do and the power to use my voice to seek the truth, to hold powerful people accountable.
I don’t think I really realized the power of my own voice until I spent all those mornings anchoring CBS This Morning and talking to such a range of, not just world leaders and politicians, but artists and authors and businesswomen. I think I learned a lot from that experience.
That consciousness feels very much in line with this new era at CBS News, with women in senior positions, from CBS News president Susan Zirinsky on down and with women like Gayle King and Margaret Brennan and you in the anchor chairs. When I think back on the #MeToo upheaval in media and entertainment, which obviously affected CBS, one big topic of conversation was who gets to decide which stories are told. With this new job, how much are you thinking about the balance of stories and diversity of those stories on CBS Evening News?
Part of my role as the anchor of CBS News is also managing editor. And I take that role very seriously. That’s an editorial focus—the types of stories we cover and the types of people that make up our stories on the air. And this is a new era at CBS News led by Susan Zirinsky, and part of that new era includes a new culture. It’s a culture of inclusion. It’s a culture of diversity. And that’s not only in our workplace, but in the types of stories that we tell.
The narrative does matter. What strikes me now is that the types of stories we tell and we choose to put in a 30-minute broadcast should also be reflective of America. So I’m looking very closely at that, and I intend to use that voice and that perspective that I’ve developed to guide that.
In your conversations with Susan and with some of the other people at the network, has there ever been a freeze-frame moment, like, “I can’t believe we’re the people who are having these conversations”? I think a lot of women haven’t been able to imagine that when they’re at the peak of their career, if they get there, it’ll be possible for them to sit in a room with three or five other women who are empowered too.
Oh my gosh, I mean, never in my wildest dreams did I think that I was going to be the anchor of the CBS Evening News. And at the same time as our first female president of CBS News? You know, never, ever. But we are in the midst of this transformative time. I’ve been talking for a while about the 21st century being a century of women. And over the years, it was really a sense of optimism and hope that led me to say that.
But now I feel like I’m at the center of this moment, this change. And it’s happening at CBS. And it’s not only Susan Zirinsky. It’s also [executive vice president of news] Kim Godwin and [executive vice president of strategic professional development] Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, both of whom are women of color. And across all the networks, women anchor all the morning broadcast shows—CBS This Morning, the Today show, Good Morning America. It’s an incredible time, and I think we’ve been waiting for that. I said it 18 months ago and I still feel it: Women cannot achieve equality in the workplace until there is a reckoning and a taking of responsibility. I really do feel hopeful that we are getting closer to that and to getting to that dream of equality.
It’s very exciting, but the work isn’t done.
Right, and look: There are still great challenges out there. I mean, look at the U.S. women’s soccer team. We did that story for 60 Minutes three years ago about their first complaint with the EEOC. It didn’t go anywhere. But they kept pushing. And they keep fighting. They never quit.
And they keep winning.
And they keep winning.
When news broke of your appointment to this position, it should have been this historic, incredible announcement. And it was. But there was also this background noise that felt so regressive. This narrative came out and pitted you against Gayle King, who has been a close coworker of yours for years. Was that hard to tune out? How did you process both your total joy over this huge development and also the awareness that these kinds of stories are going to be written about women who are doing well?
Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Luckily, I have some perspective on it now. Probably the best advice that I got was from Oprah at the time. You know, she called me a couple of times and I didn’t recognize the phone number and so I thought, Oh, it’s just a reporter that I don’t want to talk to. Then I checked my voice mail and the message was like, “Norah, it's Oprah. Call me back.”
I’m like, “Oh, my God!”
So when I did call her, Oprah said, in the midst of all this, “You will not rise without challenge. You will have the last word, and this job is your supreme destiny.” She was talking to me, and I was scribbling so quickly to write down everything she said. I have notes from that conversation! She reminded me about the importance and power of perspective. The truth is whenever someone is in a position of power, male or female, that person will have critics, but it’s not the critic who counts. It’s the person in the arena.
But that was a new experience for me, and I know now that it’s okay to acknowledge that that exists, but also you can’t allow it to distract from your own record and reputation.
That is wonderful advice, but isn’t it also even better because it came from Oprah?
Oh, exactly.
It would be good if your husband said that to you, but—
I know. If I had been feeling any anxiety it was quickly alleviated by Oprah. Which, again, is a reminder: Surround yourself with a support team and people who know who you are and care about you. For me, one of the great lessons is you really can’t do any of these hard jobs alone.
What will success look like for you? Let’s say, 12 months from now.
I really want us to be the most trusted broadcast in America. I mean that. We are bombarded by information, whether it’s alerts on our phones or cable news. Where’s the one place that you can sit down, kick off your sneakers or your heels and say, “I’m going to get the truth now for 30 minutes.” Truth is under attack, civility is under attack, journalism is under attack. And I think we can fix that. We can fix that by restoring trust in the product. Success looks like a top-quality broadcast.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Mattie Kahn is a senior editor at Glamour. Follow her @mattiekahn.
