PASADENA, Calif. -- In the midst of criticism of network television for excessive coverage of the tragic deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law, ABC newswoman Diane Sawyer has come under perhaps the most peculiar criticism of all.
For not being there to add her voice to the chorus.And, specifically, for not going on the air to talk about the deaths of people she knew quite well. People who were her close friends.
In other words, for declining to take advantage of her personal relationships at a time of tragedy. For opting out of a story for which she, perhaps, couldn't maintain the professional distance journalism requires.
And for this she's being criticized?
"I do want to make it clear that I think a lot of people in this country felt the weight of the tragedy," Sawyer said. "And I'm not saying that I didn't too, but that was not the reason (she stayed away). I did have other personal considerations. And they are personal."
She declined to say what those personal obligations were, repeatedly deflecting questions about exactly what she was doing in the days following the plane crash. Although there were widespread reports that she was simply too upset by the deaths to go on the air, Sawyer denied those.
"Some of the stories, I have no idea where they came from," Sawyer said. "That was not the situation."
The insinuation in the questions seemed to be, however, that there was something inherently wrong with someone being too upset by the deaths of close friends to report on those deaths on a major broadcast network. What kind of sense does that make?
And Sawyer was indeed close to the Kennedys. Before she married director Mike Nichols, he dated JFK Jr.'s mother, Jacqueline Onassis. Nichols spoke at the New York City memorial service for Kennedy and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
Sawyer would neither confirm nor deny that she spent a good deal of time with another close friend, Anthony Radziwell, a former ABC News producer who was also JFK Jr.'s cousin.
Not only did she not go on the air Friday, Saturday or Sunday after the plane disappeared, but she was also missing from "Good Morning America" the following Monday and Tuesday. It was a decision she said her bosses and co-workers agreed with.
"We all discussed them and I think I did the right thing," she said. "I'm glad to say my colleagues do, too."
Sawyer said that her bosses and co-workers accepted her decision "very graciously."
"As I say, everybody understood and seemed to agree with me that I had, as I say, these obligations that I should tend to," she said.
There were widespread reports that ABC News President David Westin tried to get Sawyer back on the air sooner. While he didn't deny that, Westin also publicly supported his anchorwoman.
"It's my job to make sure that we're covering the stories and I believe we're fortunate at ABC News to have the depth of the bench that we have," Westin said. "If we didn't have that deep a bench and we needed Diane and we couldn't cover the story, it might well have come out a different way. And Diane and I have talked that through.
"But the fact is, we had Barbara Walters, we had Peter Jennings . . . we had Connie Chung . . . we had Ted Koppel and we used all those people. We had all those people available to us and under the circumstances, it was the right call to make."
Sawyer herself pointed to the presence of so many other ABC News "stars" covering the tragedy. And, while adamantly refusing to be specific, she said her sense of personal obligation outweighed her professional obligations.
"I think we all have senses of personal obligation," she said. "I just don't want to elaborate on it. However, there were lots of great ABC journalists covering this story and I'm not sure that every single ABC anchor or journalist shows up for every single story. ABC News was fully covered on this story, as I think everybody knows."
And when, exactly, did being a network news anchor mean that anyone gives up the right to a personal life? To personal feelings? To the right to take oneself off a story that one has strong feelings about?
Part of the problem is that network news anchors have become bigger than the stories they cover. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
But they don't owe us the answers to questions about their personal lives. "I think some things should be personal," she said. "I just do."
Now, if only Sawyer would remember that when she's interviewing other celebrities.
WILL "FRIENDS" RE-SIGN? NBC has signed a deal that will keep "Friends" on the air through the 2001-2002 season -- providing, of course, that the production company (Warner Bros.) can get the actors to stay on board that long.
Reportedly, NBC will be paying a whopping $5 million per episode for "Friends," one of the highest license fees for any sitcom ever. (Only "Seinfeld," at $5.5 million in its final season, has ever commanded a higher fee.)
The actors -- Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer -- are only signed through the upcoming TV season. According the NBC West Coast President Scott Sassa, negotiations for the 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 seasons have not even begun.
The actors would be in a pretty good position to negotiate big raises from the current salaries, which are reported to be $125,000 per episode.