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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Sorry, Katie...as long as you shill for the Bush Administration on the air, you are an enabler
Posted by Jill | 7:22 AM
Katie Couric wants everyone to know, or at least the few hundred people she addressed at the National Press Club Tuesday night, that she thinks the Iraq War was mismanaged:


“Everyone in this room would agree that people in this country were misled in terms of the rationale of this war,” said Couric, adding that it is “pretty much accepted” that the war in Iraq was a mistake.

“I’ve never understood why [invading Iraq] was so high on the administration’s agenda when terrorism was going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that [Iraq] had no true connection with al Qaeda.”

Further, Couric said the Bush administration botched the war effort, calling it “accepted truths” that it erred by“disbanding the Iraq military, and leaving 100,000 Sunni men feeling marginalized and angry...[and] whether there were enough boots on the ground, the feeling that we’d be welcomed as liberators and didn’t need to focus as much on security.” She added “I’d feel totally comfortable saying any of that at some point, if required, on television.”

The former “Today” show anchor traced her discomfort with the administration’s march to war back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.”


Not difficult enough to not join in the jingoistic chorus, though.

If Couric is so troubled by the conduct of this war, then whence this puff-piece about Petraeus, in which she dutifully parrots the Administration's talking points?





Sorry, Katie, you don't get a pass on this one. You had a unique opportunity, with your popularity and the clout you had as co-anchor of Today to educate the very Americans who need it most -- the people scrambling around to get ready for work and get the kids ready for school, the ones whose only exposure to what's happening in the world around them is what their ears pick up by osmosis from the morning news/talk shows. And instead you decided to dutifully spout the Bush Administration's talking points and pump up David Petraeus until the Fox News gasbags and their followers were no longer able to distinguish Petraeus from Jesus.

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Saturday, September 01, 2007

From Edward R Murrow to Katie Couric: The Dumbing Down of TV News
Posted by Anonymous | 7:11 AM

The Washington Post:
Katie Couric to Report From Iraq, Syria
NEW YORK -- Katie Couric plans to leave Wednesday for an ambitious reporting trip to Iraq and Syria _ the CBS anchor's first time in the war zone _ in anticipation of a crucial military report on progress of the American effort.

Couric will anchor the "CBS Evening News" from Baghdad next Tuesday and Wednesday, then from Damascus on Thursday and Friday.

Couric will travel throughout Iraq to talk to military and civilian leaders, soldiers and average Iraqis, spending most of her time outside of Baghdad. CBS News would not reveal many specifics of her plans in advance because of competitive and safety concerns. The trip, in the works for six weeks, anticipates the surge progress report by Gen. David Petraeus that is expected the second week of September.

"You can't help but get a very detached perspective when you're not there and you're not witnessing things firsthand," Couric told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "I'm curious about very basic questions regarding living conditions, about how much fear there is in the street, about how the soldiers really are doing."
I can't wait for the first closeup of Katie Couric's tear-stained face after she realizes how awful the war is.

I'm sorry, but count Yours Truly as among those who sees Couric's trip to Iraq more as a desperate move to boost sagging ratings than as a act of heroism. I'm sure Couric's horse and pony show will be no different than when John McCain and Joe Lieberman went and reported the same old lies when they got back. The perky anchor for the CBS Evening News will be the safest person in Iraq.

Living in an era where Ms. Katie Couric is getting paid $60, 000 a day for reading from a teleprompter brings to mind how sad, tragic and depressing George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck is , if only because it pointedly reminds me how much we lost. Every once in a while I'll grab the DVD from my collection and watch it again, just to depress myself some more.

Good Night, and Good Luck is a complex film that’s almost too big to neatly fit into the narrow category of being a “historical” drama. Yes, it’s a loving Valentine to a bygone era in American history, but it’s also a horror movie, a time capsule packed by a sharp-eyed, unsentimental archivist, and a political allegory. Specifically, as Lillian Hellman commented in her memoir describing her experiences as a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter during that period, it was “scoundrel time”.

When Good Night, and Good Luck begins, it is 1953 and the angry hysteria of McCarthyism is at its peak. Anybody who foolishly expressed their First Amendment rights suddenly found themselves vilified as “commies” and either lost their jobs or were threatened with treason for “anti-American” activities. In those grim days, the United States was a horror novel co-written by George Orwell and Franz Kafka.

People were absolutely scared to death of Senator Joseph McCarthy. They had good reason to be. So can you imagine what an odd mismatch it appeared to be when Edward R. Murrow, the respected TV journalist, confronted this Golem from the "Better Dead, Than Red" days?

Although Good Night, and Good Luck is only his second film, Clooney constructs this gripping cat-and-mouse game with skill and confidence. It’s a pressure cooker of a drama that simmers to a feverish, claustrophobic intensity. However, throughout the film, Clooney inserts small, ironic historical bookmarks of the era that brings to mind political songwriter Gil Scott-Heron’s observation: “What you call nostalgia ain’t what I been missing”.

First of all, there aren’t any men or women of color working at CBS. If so, they were mopping the floors, taking out the trash, and shining white men’s shoes. There wasn’t a “White Only” sign in sight, but it didn’t have to be. No, I’m not saying that the people employed at CBS were racist, but the circumstances that kept the workplaces in America segregated certainly were.

The few women who weren’t secretaries at CBS in the 1950s had to struggle with gender politics as well. Sure, they worked just as hard as their male counterparts in the newsroom, but they were also expected to get the coffee, too. Do you think somebody is going to yell at Ms. Couric, “Hey, Katie! Will you get me a large Vanilla Chai latte - skim milk, please, no cream” today?

And, of course, everybody smoked. In Good Night, and Good Luck, there’s a scary, it-shouldn’t-be-funny-but-it-is moment when an actor in a TV commercial is selling lung cancer with a smile as he cheerfully explains why Kent cigarettes are “good for you”. No, I don’t miss these distasteful relics at all.

But Edward R. Murrow, the honorable “face of television” is gone and he left behind a vacuum that today’s journalistic pygmies have been unable to fill. Other than a holy madman like Keith Olbermann, the tough, stubborn, hard-boiled TV news reporter who digs up scandalous crimes that the public needs to know about is a heroic archetype in American culture that doesn’t exist anymore. A contemporary talking head like Katie Couric isn’t on the CBS evening news to inform us. Couric is there to make us feel better. She’s a smiling, bright-eyed opiate telling us comfortable, well-written lies. And all of us are poorer for it.

The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote, “Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” Good Night, and Good Luck illustrates in chilling detail how McCarthyism, or, the “Red Scare” was the collective lunacy that seized the United States by the throat and wouldn’t let go. Brave men like Edward R. Murrow helped set us free by taking a stand, asking the hard questions and telling us the truth.

Who’s doing that now?

When did news become lightweight entertainment?

After seeing the film, I couldn't help thinking that maybe the angry patriotic fervor ignited by 9/11 which led to this brutal and unnecessary war with Iraq could have been stopped if a real TV or newspaper journalist--and not a White House cheerleader--asked the right questions before it was too late.

Good Night, and Good Luck ends with these prophetic words about television by Edward R. Murrow:

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

Hey, guess what? Amy Winehouse won't be appearing at the MTV music awards this year! Details at 11.



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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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