My old dead tree version of the Atlantic finally arrived, and with it a lovely, insightful piece on Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News by Caitlin Flanagan.
As the new Kaplinsky Five News prepares to take to the air, and the revived News at Ten struggles, here is Flanagan’s conclusion on Couric:
That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked.
Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail — and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon.
Because Katie remembered the old world, the one in which the most-respected news was broadcast at the end of the day, she thought that she was taking a more powerful job. But the Today show—broadcast for four hours a day, a forum for interviews with many of the top newsmakers of the day, as well as for the kind of lifestyle-trend stories it pioneered and that have come to play such a big part in the nightly news—is a far more culturally significant program.
But you should read the whole thing.
