Meredith Vieira Remade Her Career Midway Through
Journalist, TV host to deliver Commencement address
Meredith Vieira calls herself a reporter who tired of reporting; she’ll give BU’s Commencement address May 17. Photo by Andrew Eccles/NBC.
Meredith Vieira is compelling and candid proof that there are second acts in American lives.
Explaining why, as a mother, she walked away in 1997 from her career as a broadcast news journalist to become the first moderator and a cohost of ABC-TV’s The View, she once confessed, “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.”
Necessity being the mother of reinvention, Vieira emceed The View for nine years, guiding her costars through conversations about contemporary issues large and small. She also hosted the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and 11 seasons on the game show won her 2 of her 14 Emmys. She currently hosts an eponymous nationally syndicated daytime talk show.
Vieira will continue her career as a talker by addressing BU’s 142nd Commencement May 17, where she’ll be awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. She won’t hand out prize money to BU’s graduates (the more than $75 million she gave away during her Millionaire run would amount to more than $21,400 for each graduate, if she was able to be similarly generous on Nickerson Field). Yet she promises to outline how her own life’s evolution offers lessons that may help her listeners heading into the rest of their lives.
“Everyone is looking for success, but how do you know when you’ve found it?” she asks rhetorically. “Although they may not realize it, in the past four years, BU grads have learned more about what really matters than many people do in a lifetime. But there’s still room for growth. So pay attention to the duck and the shark.” (Don’t ask—you’ll have to listen to the speech. “How’s that for a tease?” she says.)
Saying she’s “incredibly humbled” to be chosen to receive an honorary degree, Vieira adds, “but not so humbled that I didn’t tell my husband, Richard, he needs to start referring to me as Doctor Vieira. He promptly threw up a little.”
Her appearance marks a bit of connection with the past: Katie Couric (Hon.’11), whom Vieira succeeded as coanchor of NBC’s Today show in 2006, gave BU’s Commencement address in 2011.
Born and raised in Rhode Island to Portuguese-American parents, Vieira graduated magna cum laude from Tufts in 1975 and cut her broadcasting teeth at a Worcester, Mass., radio station and a local Providence TV station before moving to WCBS-TV in New York. She gained national exposure with CBS in the mid- and late-1980s on the news magazine shows West 57th and 60 Minutes. She later switched to ABC, first as a journalist and then as moderator of The View, leaving to coanchor Today. Although she stepped down from the anchor desk in 2011, she remains an NBC correspondent. Last year, she became the first woman to anchor NBC’s Olympics coverage, helming the network’s reporting on the Sochi winter games. (She’d previously covered three Olympics.)
Vieira is also an entrepreneur, having launched her YouTube channel, LIVES with Meredith Vieira, in 2013. Her online biography describes her role as driving “the conversation between and about women with a mix of deeply personal, informative, and entertaining content created around the authentic, funny, and sometimes raw stories that make up our day-to-day existence.”
This year’s other BU honorary degree recipients are trustee Allen Questrom (Questrom’64) and his wife, Kelli Questrom, whose record $50 million gift to BU this spring will expand the Questrom School of Business, Doctor of Humane Letters; Cornell Brooks (STH’87), president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who will be the Baccalaureate speaker, Doctor of Laws; and jazz promoter, producer, and Grammy winner George Wein (CAS’50), Doctor of Humane Letters.
More information about Commencement can be found here.
Author, Rich Barlow can be reached at barlowr@bu.edu.