Katie’s Error

Every morning, my husband rushes around the house locating his blackberry and his turkey sandwich before running out of the house for the 6:50 bus to Manhattan, To avoid bodily harm, I wisely decide to stay out of his way. Instead, I pour myself a cup of coffee and watch 15 minutes of the morning news shows.

I’ll flip back and forth between CBS and NBC. The shows are interchangeable. Perky people who will just as happily tell you about an up-coming storm, the latest in shoe fashion, and results of the Michigan primary. What happened when I slept?

At 7:05, I’ll reluctantly turn off the news and start toasting the waffles and fishing damp jeans out of the dryer.

That 15 minutes is only time that I’ll digest TV news. As a blogger and a political scientist, I’ll be getting news all day, but I’ll be mainlining headlines through the Times website and bloglines. By the time that 6:30 rolls around, I’ll be cooking, tutoring, chauffeuring. I’ll be yelling at kids to quit their computer programs and making them fold up their Taekwondo pajamas.

I never watch the 6:30 news. And neither do my students.

When I teach Politics and Media, I assign the most widely used textbook, but the students don’t know what to make out of it. The author writes as if the world still looked up to news anchors. She talks familiarly and respectfully of Brian Williams and Katie Couric. She assumes that the students also worship them. No. The students worship Jon Stewart. They have never watched the 6:30 news, not even once. They have never watched the local 5:00 news shows either. I have to actually assign a project to get the students to watch those shows, so they will care more about the text. I might as well have asked them to go to a museum.

Finally, Flanagan has written an article for Atlantic that most bloggers will agree with. She writes about Katie Couric’s dumb move from the morning show to the evening news.

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. One reason that this huge star didn’t have a tell-all biography written about her until now is that while she was at Today, no publisher wanted to antagonize her; a booking on the show was every new author’s dream. The release of Klein’s splashy book, then, is evidence not of Katie’s elevation, but of its opposite. She made the kind of mistake that women a generation younger than hers probably wouldn’t have. She spent her time gunning for a position that had been drained of its status and importance long before she got there. And what she has learned, the hard way, is that her climb to the top has been not a triumph but the act of someone who slept through a revolution.

Couric’s likability has also been questioned lately. There have always been rumors that Couric doesn’t play well with others, and Matt Lauer still has the fresh honeymoon glow from Meredith Vieira. I didn’t bond with her like Flanagan did, but I never hated her. She seemed always seemed more approachable than Matt Lauer, who I imagine washing his hands after shaking hands with people. (I once sat one table over from Lauer, Bryant Gumbel, and their wives at a restaurant. Chilly city. They never spoke to each other through the meal.)

While I feel bad for Couric for making such a dumb move, I don’t mourn the end of network news. It was always staged and superficial. I love that news production and commentary is so decentralized and open. The last viewers of the network news are one shuffleboard game away from extinction. Couric better start a blog.