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.

Comments

[Amy P]

That was really insightful of Flanagan. I'm glad to see her back in form.

I remember the 6 o'clock news as being really exciting when I was in my teens. I'd hear the thrilling drumbeat of ABC's theme music, drop everything, run down the stairs, and watch raptly as Peter Jennings announced the crumbling of the latest communist dictatorship. It was fantastic. Coincidentally, I went on to be a Russian/print journalism double major (I know, I know). Teachers had the Channel 1 TVs on for Gulf War coverage, also. That was very exciting, too. I didn't watch the news as a college student and this was pre-internet, but one of my really tough journalism professors had news quizes every class (I subscribed to the LA Times and skimmed through a week's worth of unread copies before class), and another really tough journalism professor made us watch the 7 AM (Pacific time) broadcast of Meet the Press on Sunday mornings and do projects based on it. I watched it in the totally empty dorm TV lounge, cursing my professor, but I developed a lot of respect for Russert's black arts.

We didn't watch TV news as graduate students, but did tune in for the 2000 elections, staying up half the night. A couple years later, I was watching CNN news in a hotel room with a 10 month old baby. The invasion of Iraq was underway, and the embedded correspondent was rather too obviously experiencing it as a combination of Christmas/birthday/last day of school/graduation/etc. Watching it with my infant, I felt ridiculous envy--I wished I were him. It would be so much fun! Since then, CNN has flashed briefly through my life, but mainly while we're in airports, hotels, or out watching election returns. It's not a daily, weekly, or even monthly routine. Nowadays we're just finishing dinner around six, and at six thirty, our youngest is going to bed. The last time I recall watching news was in the Dallas airport earlier this year. I remember being disgusted by the Anna Nicole Smith coverage, and feeling embarrassed for CNN. I only miss TV news for big natural disasters (the tsunami, Katrina, etc.) because you miss out on the scope of these things when you experience it on a laptop screen. Otherwise, no.

[Doug]

Here in Germany, the big news time is 8pm, which seems suitably grown-up for me, and also reasonably well suited to contemporary schedules. It's also short: 15 minutes with no commercials. Still a key agenda-setter, too. The main weekly talker is Sunday evening, after the most popular cop show, at 9:45 pm. Another grown-up time, and unlikely to interfere with Germans' non-churchgoing on Sunday mornings. Don't know why the times start on the quarter-hours. One of those quirky path-dependency things.

Quick Googling shows that China's main nightly news comes at 7pm; always has a male and a female presenter; got some fresh thirty-something faces in 2006; faces competition from a Murdoch-backed channel; and has declining interest among younger people in part because of the show's close ties to the CCP.

Wonder what other places are like...

[af]

The only time I really miss the big news anchors is during times of genuine news (as opposed to Anna Nicole Smith or the latest runaway bride or whatever). I remember when Hurricane Katrina hit I really longed for Brokaw or Rather to show up for special reports so that I could know what was "really going on" - though I don't watch the evening news, somehow I have an ingrained trust of those anchors. The current anchors, Couric included, don't inspire that trust.