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Meredith Vieira Filmography
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Meredith Vieira (born December 30, 1951) is the host of a network talk show, a syndicated game show, and a cable biography series on American television.
The talk show is ABC's The View, which she moderates and co-hosts with Barbara Walters, Joy Behar and Star Jones. Vieira has been its moderator since the show's inception in 1997.
She also performs hosting duties for the U.S. syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which was a 2002 spin-off of the U.S. broadcast version hosted by
Regis Philbin.
The cable show is Lifetime's
Intimate Portrait, which covers the lives of women in art, entertainment, politics, business, science, journalism and sports. She has hosted that show since 1999.
Prior to her various hosting duties, she first came to national recognition as a CBS reporter and correspondent for news magazine shows such as 60 Minutes. She moved to ABC initially as a news journalist, but made the career switch when, as she recalls:
:
Once I realized I was a reporter who didn't want to report because it required a tremendous amount of travel, nobody was too interested in having me work for them. I had to reinvent myself.
Vieira was born in Providence, Rhode Island. She began her career in 1975 as a news announcer for WORC radio in Worcester, Massachusetts, after graduating magna cum laude from Tufts University.
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Latest news on Meredith Vieira
IssuesMedia Matters: The media's Minnesota debacle
With only about 200
votes out of nearly 3 million cast separating Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and his Democratic challenger,
Al Franken, the race is headed to a recount.
Naturally, conservative radio hosts are working themselves
into a lather, baselessly accusing
Democrats of trying to "steal" the election. That shouldn't
surprise anyone. But NBC and The New York
Times have also pushed the dubious notion that the Minnesota recount has been plagued by chaos
and impropriety.
Here's
how Meredith Vieira, co-host of NBC's Today, began a report on the Minnesota
recount: "If you thought the election debacle in Florida
could never happen again, wait until you see the situation in Minnesota."
This is nonsense. The "debacle" in Florida wasn't
that there was a recount; the "debacle" was an absurdly designed ballot that led to
thousands of people who
meant to vote for Al Gore voting for Pat Buchanan instead. The "debacle"
was that thousands of voters were improperly
purged from voter rolls.
The "debacle" was that the state's electoral votes were
awarded to the candidate for whom fewer voters attempted to cast ballots. None
of those factors are present in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Senate race is simply in the midst of a
recount. Recounts happen. They aren't the illegitimate, anything-goes street fights the media
pretend they are; they are a part of how elections work, their process written
into law and executed every year. They are necessary, for a perfectly obvious
reason: They make it
more likely that the candidate who receives the most votes takes office. That
is an unequivocally good thing.
During that Today
segment, reporter Lee Cowan announced that the situation "has some
remembering shades of Florida,
of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. There are neither of those here."
What possible
reason could there be for bringing up "butterfly ballots and hanging
chads," given that "there are neither of those" present in Minnesota? Whatever the
intent, the effect is clear -- it creates the impression that the situation in Minnesota is utter chaos, a "debacle" in
the making.
Cowan continued: "Still, ballots have suddenly
appeared out of nowhere, including some found unsecured in an election worker's
car."
That appears to be completely false. Election officials have
said the ballots did not "suddenly appear[] out of nowhere," and
they were not "unsecured." The claim about unsecured ballots in a
car appears to have originated with Norm Coleman's lawyer. Cowan did not attribute
the car story to anyone or anything,
he simply asserted it as fact. Adopting and repeating Coleman's
lawyer's claims as though they are facts is bad enough. What
makes it worse is that the lawyer had already backed off the claim. Two full
days before Cowan's report, the Coleman lawyer had been quoted saying that "we've heard
enough from the city attorney to let go of this. It does not appear that there
was any ballot-tampering, and that was our concern."
So Cowan offered a sensational and -- by his own
acknowledgement -- wholly irrelevant comparison to the "butterfly ballots
and hanging chads" of the 2000 recount. Then he made a false assertion of
ballots materializing out of thin air, and of unsecured ballots -- an assertion
that seems to have been based entirely on the already-retracted claims of a
Coleman campaign lawyer.
Vieira
concluded the segment by referring to the "mess in Minnesota." But there is no mess. There is simply a recount -- a
recount that does not involve
butterfly ballots or hanging chads,
a recount that, despite the best efforts of Vieira and Cowan to convince us otherwise, has
not a thing in common with the "debacle" in Florida. Just a simple recount.
Today's New York
Times similarly promoted the idea of chaos and impropriety in the Minnesota recount --
without actually providing any evidence or examples. The Times reported:
If Fritz Knaak has his way, Mr. Franken will
never have a shot at solving those problems. A lawyer hired by Mr. Coleman
expressly for the recount, Mr. Knaak described himself as "the new gun
with the shiny pistol." Citing
suspicion over what he called a series of "shenanigans" that have
narrowed Mr. Coleman's lead, he has requested the official
paper tape with the number of ballots and the time stamp printed out by each ballot
machine, in every voting precinct.
The Times gave
no examples of "shenanigans" or any indication of who is
"suspicious" that such "shenanigans" have occurred. Nor
did it give any indication that it asked Knaak for examples of either shenanigans
or suspicion.
Later in the article, the Times
reported:
Mr. Coleman's campaign manager, Cullen
Sheehan, accused the Franken campaign of "a brazen, last minute act of
desperation," by asking Hennepin
County, which includes Minneapolis, to reconsider
461 rejected absentee ballots.
Mr. Franken's
lead lawyer, Marc Elias, called such assertions of ballot stuffing
"fanciful and bogus."
But there were no "assertions of ballot
stuffing" -- none the Times
reported, anyway. The Times
simply quoted Coleman's campaign manager saying the Franken
campaign's request to reconsider previously rejected ballots is an
indication of "desperation." That's quite different from
making an allegation of "ballot stuffing."
Then the Times
reported that Minneapolis Star Tribune
columnist Katherine Kersten expressed concerns about the ability of
Minnesota's Democratic secretary
of state, Mark Ritchie,
to act impartially during the recount, without indicating Kersten's own
political leanings. As Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert explained,
"Kersten is a right-winger who smeared
Franken right before Election Day as a 'slanderer of Christianity.' "
Next, the Times
quoted a "Republican researcher" who is "very, very
concerned" about Ritchie. Then it quoted Sean Hannity saying "[f]ishy business" is
occurring in Minnesota,
where Democrats and elections officials are
"up to no good." To what "[f]ishy
business" was Hannity referring? Were his allegations legitimate? The Times did not say.
Finally, the Times
quoted the Facebook status of "Noah Rouen, 34," a Minnesota man on a pheasant hunt who, along
with his friends, "could not help but hatch a conspiracy theory."
If it seems the Times
is desperate to find people concerned about the legitimacy of the Minnesota
recount -- resorting to quoting vague allegations from hard-right partisans
like Sean Hannity and Facebook conspiracy theories -- maybe that's
because Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's Republican governor, says there is
"no actual evidence that there's been any fraud or problems." (That quote didn't appear in the Times article; maybe it got cut to make room
for the pheasant hunter's Facebook status.) And as Media Matters noted,
the Times did not note that Pawlenty said that the bipartisan state canvassing board Ritchie appointed to oversee the recount was "fair"
and that a lawyer for Coleman's campaign reportedly said that the "state should feel
good about who's on the panel."
The news media's tendency to compare any recount to
the "butterfly ballots and hanging chads" made famous during
Florida's 2000 recount, and to breathlessly report the merest rumor of impropriety,
is not merely lazy and absurd and sensationalist. It is also dangerous. It
causes people to be frightened and concerned about all recounts -- to be wary
of the very concept of recounts.
But recounts needn't be like the "debacle" of 2000; in fact,
they rarely are. They are far more frequently the best way to ensure that
errors in counting do not result in the candidate who received fewer votes
taking office. (Indeed, in 2004, a manual recount in the Washington governor's race reversed the results of the
initial Election Day tabulations and machine recount.) Sensational and baseless
reporting like that produced this week by NBC and The New York Times runs the risk of undermining public confidence in
an essential part of the democratic process.
Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.
Published: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:38:07 GMT - Source: Mediamatters.Org - Read the articleIssuesToday double standard: Clinton, but not McCain, grilled on gas tax break proposal
During an interview on the June 11 edition of NBC's Today, when Sen. John McCain twice touted
the idea of a gas tax "break," co-host Matt Lauer did not challenge
him. By contrast, on the May 5 edition of the program, when Sen. Hillary
Clinton mentioned her proposal "to get the gas tax paid this summer out
of the record profits of the oil companies," co-host Meredith Vieira
interjected: "Let me talk to you about this suspending the gas tax
because there's apparently no economist that says that it is a good
policy, and yesterday, you were asked if you could name a single credible
economist who supports you." Moments later, Vieira added:
"[T]hey're saying it's not a good idea. ... They're
saying it's not sound policy."
Lauer offered no challenge even though moments before the
interview, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell had
reported that Sen. Barack Obama "calls" a gas tax holiday a
"gimmick" and that "even some Republicans say suspending the
gas tax for the summer won't work." Mitchell then aired a video clip
of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) saying, "It's
pure demagoguery. I mean, John McCain has shown some capacity to understand
some economics."
From the June 11 edition of NBC's Today:
[begin video clip]
MITCHELL: On the economy, they have big differences
over taxes, government spending, and energy. McCain supports a summertime gas tax holiday,
which Obama calls a "gimmick." McCain with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo:
McCAIN: I think you're out of touch with America, I think, when you don't support such a thing. And it was just a break. It was just a break. They need it right now.
MITCHELL: But even some Republicans
say suspending the gas tax for
the summer won't work.
ARMEY: It's pure demagoguery. I mean, John McCain has shown some capacity
to understand some economics.
MITCHELL: And Democrats are trying
to portray McCain as out of touch on the economy and the war.
[end video clip]
[...]
LAUER: Gas: $4 a gallon. You know --
McCAIN: Sure.
LAUER: Americans want to know --
McCAIN: Yeah.
LAUER: -- that the next president of
the United States,
Senator, gets it -- feels
their pain. But when it
comes right down to it -- when it comes to the price of gas -- is there anything that either you or
Senator Obama can do about it if elected president?
McCAIN: I think, clearly, though, we could give them a bit of a break
for this summer. I
mean, I ran into a guy --
Senator Obama as you noted calls it a "gimmick" -- I ran into a guy recently that owns three
trucks -- paying
24-and-a-half cents a gallon for every gallon of diesel. He said, "Senator, that would help me a
lot make it through the summer."
So, it was
just a chance to give low-income Americans an opportunity. But the real key to this is nuclear power, alternate
energy. We've got
to -- solar, wind, tide, develop batteries. We have to embark on a national mission -- a national mission to
become energy independent. Nuclear
power has to play a big role in that.
Not only for energy independence --
LAUER: So enough of the debate about
--
McCAIN: -- but also --
LAUER: -- whether we drill in the
wilderness areas 'cause
that's still oil, oil, oil.
McCAIN: Yeah.
LAUER: You -- your energy plan will take
us away from oil?
[...]
LAUER: And are they doing enough in that
area?
McCAIN: No, they're not.
LAUER: We had [ExxonMobil CEO] Rex
Tillerson on recently
--
McCAIN: No, they're
not doing enough.
LAUER: -- of ExxonMobil, and we asked for email questions. We couldn't air half
of the email questions. They
were so upset. People
basically saying, "How can you sleep at night? How can you and the other CEOs sleep at night
when people are having
to choose between feeding their families and filling their tanks?" So is
-- are those people reacting out of pure emotion or is there some logic to
that?
McCAIN: There's logic to it
and emotion to it. I
mean, after all, look what's happening to Americans who are on fixed income, particularly low-income Americans. That's why I want to give them a little break by the
way. They
drive the furthest. They
drive the automobiles that use the most gas. I want to give them a little break for the summer. But the point is -- the
point is the oil companies have got to be more participatory in alternate
energy, in sharing their profits in a variety of ways, and there is very strong
and justifiable emotion about their profits
LAUER: Two quick subjects: tax cuts. You've
been hammered --
McCAIN: Sure.
LAUER: -- by some on the Republican and Democratic
sides about flip-flopping on these tax cuts.
From the May 5 edition of NBC's Today (as re-aired the same day on MSNBC's Verdict with Dan Abrams):
CLINTON: I know that Senator Obama
doesn't agree with me. I know Senator McCain is willing to lift the gas tax
but not pay for it. I'm willing to figure out a way to get the gas tax
paid this summer out of the record profits of the oil companies.
VIEIRA: But, Senator, let me ask you about the
gas tax.
CLINTON: That is the beginning of trying to
stand up to the oil companies, which is something we need to do.
VIEIRA: Let me talk to you about this suspending the gas tax because
there's apparently no economist that says that it is a good policy, and yesterday, you were asked if you could
name a single credible economist who supports you, and you said this. You said, "I'm not going to put in
my lot with economists."
You called that elite
opinion. So, were you saying if you were president, you would not seek the
counsel of any economists?
CLINTON: Oh, no, of course not, Meredith.
But you know, I know very well that they're worried about it not being
paid for, but I have proposed a way to pay for it.
And that is to begin what we must do in this country --
VIEIRA: But they're saying it's not a good idea. It's not even worrying about that. They're saying
it's not sound policy.
CLINTON: Well, I -- no, I disagree with
that.
Published: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:17:21 GMT - Source: Mediamatters.Org - Read the article
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