Meredith Vieira
Wouldn’t you aspire to be a television talk-show or game-show host if you knew you could rake in more than $10 million USD a year?
While this obviously wouldn’t be your starting salary, it is roughly the annual earnings of renowned Emmy Award-winning TV personality and journalist Meredith Vieira for co-hosting just one of her current shows.
Meredith Vieira, born on December 30, 1953, in Rhode Island, is most well known for her almost decade-long stint as co-host and moderator of ABC’s major day-time talk show The View, and is currently co-host with Matt Lauer of talk show The Today Show and was once the host of the US version of popular game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Her career began as a radio news announcer in 1975 in Massachusetts after she graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University , and she also started working as a local reporter and anchor, finally landing a spot in the newsroom at New York City ’s WCBS-TV.
For CBS, Vieira worked as a reporter based in the Chicago Bureau, a correspondent for various news-magazine programs, and as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News in the early 1990s, and then she moved to ABC as correspondent for Turning Point until its cancellation, upon which she decided to make a switch from reporter to hostess.
Vieira quickly garnered international recognition and acclaim as the moderator and a co-host on ABC’s The View from when it launched in 1997 until spring 2006 as the program’s most outspoken and controversial speaker. The program, a women’s day-time talk show featuring a panel of female co-hosts, currently includes Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and Rosie O’Donnell. Vieira left The View in 2006 to accept an invitation to replace Katie Couric on The Today Show (NBC).
The Today Show—the highest rated morning talk show in the U.S. since late 1995—debuted back in 1952, a year before Vieira’s birth, and currently includes Matt Lauer as Vieira’s co-host (since 1994), as well as co-anchors Al Roker (national weather updates), Ann Curry (news headlines), Natalie Morales (national correspondent), Gene Shalit (entertainment critic), and Peter Greenberg (travel editor).
Vieira wass also the acclaimed game show host of the U.S. version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, a 2002 spin-off of the show hosted by Regis Philbin, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2005 for “Outstanding Game Show Host.” Vieira also began working as host of Lifetime’s Intimate Portrait, a cable women’s profile-biography series, in 1999.
During the course of her career, Vieira has been noted for her outspoken views and opinions and for occasionally sparking debate and creating controversy. For example, in 1988 she posed for Esquire Magazine in what some claimed was an unprofessional, questionable, and too-revealing photo, which Vieira defended and maintained was done in fun. She also admitted she hasn’t really watched The View since her departure, because she said the media had turned the show into a joke.
Vieira has been married to Richard Cohen, a journalism professor at Columbia University , since 1986, and has three children with him. |
