Origins
The Couric interview was preceded by heavy media scrutiny over the McCain campaign's alleged unwillingness to allow press access to Palin.
Palin explains in her memoirs that from the beginning Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain staffer, pushed for Couric and the CBS Evening News. "The campaign's general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn't have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon," wrote Palin.
"Katie really likes you," Wallace said according to Palin. "She's a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughters like you. She just relates to you...believe me, I know her very well. I've worked with her...She just has such low self-esteem...She just feels she can't trust anybody. She wants you to like her. You know what? We'll schedule a segment with her, If it doesn't go well, if there's no chemistry, we won't do any others."
Wallace disputed Palin's account. "The whole notion there was a conversation where I tried to cajole her into a conversation with Katie is fiction". Wallace earlier had praised the channel, “We had no input on usage...we had no ground rules on the interview. I think that’s pretty unprecedented. A lot of people negotiate platforms. We didn’t negotiate platforms or air dates.”
"We were initially supposed to interview her—sit down with her in Philadelphia on Sunday and travel with Senator McCain and Governor Palin on that Monday," Couric recalled. "And then the campaign felt they didn't want a week to go by without hearing anything from Governor Palin because they were doling out the interviews very selectively. So they decided when she was visiting some world leaders at the UN, that that would be an opportunity for her to sit down that morning and talk to me and it was very serendipitous for us, because we could—that opened the door to a lot of interesting foreign policy questions. And, also, in addition to that, the financial crisis was sort of really heating up during that week, so that was another opportunity. Then, we had scheduled an interview the following Monday, during which we were going to talk about a lot of domestic and social issues, so they gave us tremendous access."
Newsweek reported that at the time of the Couric interview, Palin felt that she had been overmanaged for her first one-on-one debut with a network anchor, Charlie Gibson of ABC and "rebuffed Wallace's help with her Couric interview." McCain advisers said that Palin "did not have the time or focus to prepare for the interview." "She did not say, 'I will not prepare,'” a McCain adviser said. "She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded."
Read more about this topic: Sarah Palin Interviews With Katie Couric
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