Head over to The New Yorker’s Web site and you’ll see that Nancy Franklin’s latest covers ABC’s upcoming “limited series” — new TV-world parlance for “mini-series” — set in the final weeks of Caesar’s Rome. Franklin tells us she more or less hates mini-series and then says that that ABC’s “Empire” isn’t all that bad. (New York’s John Leonard also liked it.) After she dispenses with ABC, you might expect Franklin to move on to HBO’s “Rome,” which she touches on earlier in the piece, but her next target is NBC, and everyone’s favorite punching bag, Katie Couric. In what seems like an impromptu rant on the Jennifer Wilbanks saga — the only way you know it’s coming is if you check in with the table of contents, because it’s left out of the header of the piece — Franklin has this to say:

A lot of people hate the media, it is said; unfortunately, too few of those people are themselves in the media, which, once in a while, could benefit from some purifying self-flagellation. The coverage of the doings of Jennifer Wilbanks, the “runaway bride,” back in April, and the entire hour of prime-time TV that NBC devoted to following up on the story last week — “A Katie Couric Special” — would have been a good opportunity. … Of course, viewers were naturally interested in the story of a mysterious disappearance, but, given that it was the TV-news establishment that had forced the story on us for days on end, Couric was disingenuous, at the very least, when she described the search for Wilbanks as “a national obsession” that had “gripped the nation.”

And more:

Toward the end of the show, Couric told viewers that Wilbanks was receiving inpatient treatment at a psychiatric facility...

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