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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Answer: It's Katie Couric
Posted by Jill | 8:10 AM
Bill Carter in the New York Times scratches his head and wonders if Katie Couric's abysmal ratings are because she's a woman or something about her.

I don't know why anyone is surprised at Couric's stunning failure. Hasn't anyone at CBS watched her over the last few decades? Couric has always been about "cute", and "cute" isn't what the largely older, largely traditional evening news audience wants to hear telling them about the latest travesty in Iraq. I don't think for a minute that if Christiane Amanpour or Meredith Viera or Lesley Stahl were CBS' newsreader that the ratings would be nearly as bad. But then, women in television news that have some gravitas are few and far between, because to make it in broadcast news these days, you have to be blond and either be or look perpetually 35. This is why you have Dana Bash and Paula Zahn and the many Blonde Bots of Fox News. You'll never see Candy Crowley or Lisa Myers or anyone who's been around the block a few times, is larger than a size four, or has eschewed the plastic surgeon's knife or botox needle sitting in the anchor chair.

But that said, Couric is an especially egregious choice, because this is a woman who made her reputation being the mom, the cute sister, the giggly girlie. That this demeanor hid a ferocious ambition may have been apparent to the suits in the corporate suite, but it isn't what most people saw. Add to Couric's inherent unsuitability to the gravitas that network news requires the ridiculous mistakes such as giving Rush Limbaugh, who God knows has little enough exposure for his rants, time on a 20-minute newscast to rant even further and you have a recipe for television news disaster.

There are still people who are going to want to be read the news by Daddy, and for that audience, Charles Gibson on ABC is the only show in town at the moment. But when you have a news industry in which a woman's ability to be a public face of a network is dependent on her adherence to a particular standard of beauty, an avoidance of appearing "tough", and a certain level of nonthreatening bubbleheadedness, you're never going to develop a talent that can wear the mantle of Walter Cronkite.

It isn't that there have never been women

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