Fri, December 17, 2004
Can I Love Katie Again?
Tonight on The Daily Show Jon Stewart referred to his guest, Katie Couric, as an old friend, which I found disappointing and off-putting. Usually he has a nose for media circus barkers whose contributions to broadcasting skew more in the direction of syrupy pablum than hard journalism. (You can always see him yelling dirty names at John Stossel as soon as the mikes are off and Stossel starts storming off the set.) If anything, this causes me to reconsider my waning respect for Couric, because I feel like Stewart's threshold for this sort of thing is even higher than mine. (Not that I'll ever forgive her for playing herself – sorry, Katie Current (har!) – in Shark Tale.)
I really respected Katie Couric when she first started on The Today Show, because when Jane Pauley was replaced by Deborah Norville things got a little too cheeky. When Couric took the reins, she incorporated some of Norville's perkiness while tipping the scales back in the direction of Pauley's serious and credible style. (It was around this time that I wrote to her and obtained the autographed picture which I believe still hangs on my bedroom wall at home.) Before long, though, she started following the Today trend away from news and toward fluff. (The "serious news" portion of The Today Show has been pruned back again and again, so that it now occupies only the first half hour of the three hour program.) And she stopped asking provocative questions and started asking trite, stupid ones. ("How did you feel?" to the mother of a young girl recently struck dead by a stray bullet in a gangland drive-by is a question which still sticks out in my mind from that era.) She drifted away from Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer and toward Jill Rappaport. (Jill who? Exactly.)
I think she's a very nice lady, and I feel sympathy for her prolonged and public loss of her husband. But it's pretty clear that she's become entangled in the power struggle at NBC News – a situation that would certainly present a challenge for any woman trying to be taken seriously. By all accounts, she's to blame for inflicting former Today producer and current network chief Jeff Zucker upon us. And she does dumb stuff like take over Dateline for a night to talk to Elizabeth Smart. On The Daily Show she was promoting her children's books (Who doesn't have a couple? Any genre spanned by Madonna, Lithgow, and Billy Crystal is oversaturated.) and an upcoming special on (shock!) teen sex.
Which is just another example of her buying into the media machine and its ongoing quest to hype up the culture war and tell us all what grave danger we're in, not from terrorist missiles but from our own desires, fantasies, and decadent lifestyles. She pattered with Stewart about how in her day "hooking up" didn't mean hooking up and on and on, blah blah blah. She repeated that "parents have no idea" what their junior- and high-school aged children are up to. And whose fault is that? The parents. And what does reporting like this do? It doesn't encourage the parents to get involved in their children's lives, it encourages them to panic and push abstinence programs (or vote for politicians who push them). And all that will accomplish is to remove free condoms from the hands of their slutty children and attempt to teach them backwards ideas about what sex is and how it works. You're not going to prevent them from being curious about sex and experimenting with it – and nor should you. This isn't a problem of the "explicit media culture," it's a fact of children developing faster physiologically than they did in past generations. The best thing to do is provide them with an honest and uncensored guide to the experience and prevent them at all costs from getting pregnant. With the right approach and a little luck, this can be turned into a positive. Rather than making years of stupid mistakes and finally developing a tolerable level of sophistication with regard to romantic/physical relationships sometime after college, let them start the process early and end it early. New generations of Americans are less and less knowledgeable about politics, economics, mathematics, and basic science. Here's something teenagers are actively interested in learning about; let's guide them instead of standing in their way.
No, Katie Couric isn't singlehandedly responsible for this sort of wrongheaded shock-news propaganda. But if she were really a journalist, she'd be pursuing subjects with merit rather than contributing to the hyperbolic wail about all the dangers of modern life in order to scarf up some ratings. Follow Brokaw's approach, for crying out loud. He held up the Greatest Generation (tm) as an example, rather than focusing on something incendiary and spending 60 minutes in a shrill frenzy over it. Setting herself apart as a serious newswoman is the path to success. Nobody's in line to fill Barbara Walters's shoes, but the airwaves are overrun with people stepping into Joan Rivers's. Shouldn't this give Katie a clear idea of where she can establish a nice spot for herself for the next 30 years? Why not claim it now, while she's got her puppet running the network and her access is at an all-time high?
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"Garon Whitney" — Fri, 1/21/05 6:27am
I am on her special and she not what you think so have some respect..
Bee Boy — Thu, 1/27/05 9:19pm
Speaking of her special, don't miss tonight's Daily Show. The Moment of Zen is pulled from Katie's teen sex exposé, and features her referring to promiscuous young men as "man-hos" – oh yeah, she's at the top of her game.