Fri, March 19, 2004

It's interesting how synchronicity works. Wednesday I was at the supermarket and saw the "Globe" headline about how Katie Couric is apparently regarded as some major bitch all of a sudden. Then today, the link to Salon's article on the same subject (don't worry, they – generally – come to her defense) was posted on some blog that I got to by following some other blog that was accused of stealing the design of yet another blog, but in fact was only drawing design inspiration from it – which came up because another website (that of movie funnyboy Harland Williams) was catching heat for stealing the design of that same blogger's website. It can be a curse sitting in front of a high-speed Internet connection for eight hours a day...

Anyway, Katie Couric.

The Cruella syndrome [Fucking Salon]

(You'll have to go through that "Day Pass" crap, unless you're crazy enough to have paid for Salon Premium, but it's pretty worth it, and you can do other stuff while you click through the Day Pass ads.)

Salon makes some interesting points about the way we relate to successful women in this society. It was recently pointed out that the presidential campaign is all about macho. "Intelligent" seems "effeminate" – a man's man doesn't waffle on issues; he acts quickly, decisively, and with finality. (And unilaterally? And with faulty facts or no facts at all?) It seems that, on the other side of the spectrum, smart (or successful or ambitious) women are cast as "bitchy." During their exploration of this trend, Salon makes some points – almost by accident – about the state of the "news" business that I agree with, in part because I've been trying to make them myself for years.

Couric, quoted by Salon from an interview with CNN: "The climate is such that there's so much emphasis on ratings [...] When there is so much emphasis on ratings, it's hard for true journalism to survive."

Bingo! Also recommended reading:

State of the News Media 2004 [Project for Excellence in Journalism]

This is a huge report, but I really urge you to at least read the Content Analysis sections in the Cable TV and Local TV areas. (The intros in those areas are important, too.) If you've agreed with anything I've said about the decline in actual news reportage by cable nets like CNN, etc., you'll really enjoy this. If you haven't agreed, you probably will after reading this.

What was most surprising for me was finding a compatriot in the fight against "fluff news" in Katie Couric. I used to watch the Today show quite a lot, back when I was in school and the government was forcing me to get up ridiculously early in order to start my learnin'. I don't necessarily know why we were a today household – mostly Jane Pauley I guess, although possibly also because we were (and remain) huge Brokaw fans and I never really considered the possibility of getting our morning news from one network and our evening news from another. (Why, I don't know. Probably would've gotten more perspective that way.) Some days, we watched Tom & Jerry or Bullwinkle in the morning instead.

Anyway, I liked Katie Couric when she started on Today – in fact, my bedroom wall at home still sports an autographed picture of her – but after a few years, I started to feel like she was losing her "hard news" edge. I think it was the day she asked the mother of a young girl who had been killed on the school bus by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting, "How did you feel?" But, more than that, she just wasn't covering news stories as much as she was doing cooking segments and interviewing celebrities.

In reality, I probably should've been blaming the producers of the show instead of Couric, because it was the start of a backslide in journalistic content that continues to this day. An NBC spokesman who defended Couric in the Salon article is quoted as saying that the Today show "still has hard news in its first half hour," which to me sums it up perfectly. It's well known that Today cuts back on the hard news after 7:30, because more women are watching during that period and they figure girls are too dumb to understand news, so they show them cooking and sewing instead. Sad. Even sadder, NBC sees this as a defensible position from which to counter assaults on Couric's journalistic integrity. "We still offer actual news stories in the first quarter of our behemoth show," they seem to be saying, "so that should cover Katie for 90 minutes of make-up tips and celebrity gossip." They probably count Martha Stewart updates as part of their 30 minutes of "hard" news.

Which is another thing. State of the Media does well to point out – as did CNN's Paula Zahn on a recent Daily Show – that the obsession with getting something "live" and "first" is degrading the ability of TV journalists to get and validate sources for their stories. (Read the Cable TV Content Analysis. Really.) We all watched the crazy, silly attempts by the cable nets to be the first to report the verdict in the Martha Stewart case (as if this were particularly newsworthy, anyway) and how frequently that resulted in being wrong. How ridiculous! CNN's market domination used to be based on its perceived integrity among cable news providers; these days they're under pressure to loosen their grip on that image as they compete with networks who grab viewers by being quick and flashy – often at the expense of being right.

(This entry got a bit long. Please put in a comment when you read it, even just to say hi. I'm trying to decide if I should be like my bank and hold everything after 2:30 on a Friday for release on Monday.)