Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer feud explained in Sheila Weller’s tell-all book

Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, and Christiane Amanpour are the subjects of a new tell-all book by Vanity Fair contributor Sheila Weller.

Highlights from the book, appropriately titled The News Sorority, were posted by The Daily Beast on August 27, and include some gossipy bits about the alleged rivalry between Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer.

According to The Daily Beast‘s write-up, Sheila Weller’s tome claims that the two journalists battled each other for scoops when they appeared on competing morning shows – Katie Couric on Today, Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America – in the early 2000s.

The Daily Beast quotes Sheila Weller’s book as saying: “When a friend of Diane’s, a public figure, was being pursued by Katie’s people, the wooed eminence got a call from [Diane’s movie director husband] Mike Nichols, who said – in a very nice way, to be sure – that he and Diane would essentially cut off all social contact if their friend appeared on Today.”

Sheila Weller further alleges that Katie Couric badmouthed Diane Sawyer when the latter scored an interview they both wanted with a 57-year-old woman who’d given birth to twins. Afterward, she writes, Katie Couric was overheard saying: “I wonder who she blew this time to get it.”

Diane Sawyer, for her part, was reportedly at war with Barbara Walters.

“Barbara and Diane were determined to kill each other – to wipe each other off the face of the earth,” Sheila Weller quotes one ABC News staffer as saying.

An excerpt on the book’s Facebook page reads: “As reporters and communicators of that which was beyond their control – the news of the world – and as women in a tremendously competitive professional arena in which their gender was an impediment, their ability to strongly control what they could control has been central to their success. Each has been self-aware and self-powering in a different way, and their careers offer lessons in female survival.”

A source close to Katie Couric said that the book is “overall very positive” about the women, but that the alleged feud is “drummed up into something much bigger than it was”.