The recent spike in Katie Couric bashing continues apace, with Meryl Gordon’s laudatory take on Couric competitor “Good Morning America”‘s Diane Sawyer in New York magazine.
We’re guessing it’s been a long time since the public relations department at ABC was so excited about a lengthy review of its morning show. As for NBC’s PR department, Gordon reports, “The network declined to make Couric or [co-host Matt] Lauer available for this story, offering [the newly named executive in charge of the ‘Today’ show] [Phil] Griffin alone, and only for a phone interview. Allison Gollust, NBC’s senior vice president of news media, was so eager to make this story go away that when I first called to request interviews, she not only declined but told me that I’d be reduced to talking to ‘disgruntled ex-employees.'”
Gordon’s work can be boiled down to a simple contrast.
Sawyer = Good:
Sawyer is winning over Middle American moms while Couric is alienating them. The Ice Queen [Sawyer] enthusiastically goofs around in stunts like dressing up in seventies finery and doing the Hustle and comfortably plays well with the other cast members. Age, normally death on television for a woman, works in her favor; Sawyer will turn 60 in December, and she and Gibson, who’s 62, joke frequently about their old-fogy status. It has the effect of humanizing her: What’s more charming to middle-aged women than a middle-aged woman who’s comfortable getting older in front of them? Far from being a news snob, Sawyer has proved to have “some of the most lowbrow taste of anyone you’d ever meet,” says [“GMA” co-host Tony] Perkins. “She’ll be the one to say, ‘We should do a segment on fried Twinkies.'”
Couric = Bad:
Before viewers’ eyes, Couric has morphed from girl next door to fashionista, trading in tailored suits for leather jackets, donning what seems like a different pair of glasses every week, and switching hairstyles with Hillary Clinton-like zeal. When she went public in 2002 with the fact that she had arm-wrestled NBC into giving her a four-and-a-half-year, $65 million contract, Couric lost credibility with middle-class viewers (Sawyer doesn’t take in laundry to pay the bills but is discreet about her salary). “When you have a woman who is pushing 50 coming into your living room at 7 A.M. dressed in an extremely age-inappropriate manner and making ridiculous comments like, ‘Oh, $100 for a skirt, I can’t imagine paying that’ — when everyone knows what she’s earning — it doesn’t sit well,” says a “Today” staffer.
Sawyer, we learn, works hard, sleeps little, sends BlackBerry messages at all hours of the night. Couric, by contrast is mercurial, even whimsical — breezing into the studio and relying on experience, not careful preparation, to get her through the day. And so on.
As for the ratings, Gordon notes that “GMA” is on the verge of eclipsing long-time leader “Today,” in no small part because of the perceived differences of the aforementioned Sawyer and Couric. As Gordon puts it, “When you invite someone into your kitchen for breakfast, even if it’s just electronically, she’d better be good company, or, with a flick of the remote, you’ll show her the door. Given the current morning-TV demographics, in other words, you have to connect with Topeka housewives if you’re going to score in the ratings.”
(Also in New York, a follow-up to Dan Okrent’s final public editor column in which he took parting shots at Times‘ columnists Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd.)
Ever heard this before? Blogs are overrunning the mainstream media! Well, Time says it’s happening in South Korea too. Last year when Chan Je Hyung had a scoop on sleazeball corporate practices at Samsung he bypassed the mainstream media and opted to send a “first-person account” to OhmyNews. OhmyNews, according to Time, is “[p]art blog, part professional news agency, [getting] up to 70 percent of its copy from some 38,000 ‘citizen reporters’ like Chang — basically anyone with a story and a laptop to write it on.” Apparently, OhmyNews accepts an astounding two-thirds of its submissions after editors vet the stories. There’s an English version if you want to catch up on what’s going on in South Korea. Oh yeah, one more very important detail — the free Ohmynews turned a profit last year, managing to rake in $400,000 in advertising revenue, more than its miniscule costs. Perhaps the New York Times should take note.
If you’re interested, postmortems on the filibuster showdown come in by the truckload this week. Here’s a list, in no particular order: U.S. News, The New Republic (take one, take two), The Weekly Standard, and the Economist (take one, take two).
Continuing in the postmortem genre, Newsweek prints an obituary for the infamous “power hour” binge-drinking game often played on birthdays by newly-turned 21-year-olds in North Dakota and Minnesota. Newly-enacted legislation in both states — prompted, in part, by the death of a 21-year-old last year — prohibits bars from serving 21-year-olds until 8 a.m. of their birthday. However, the midnight party crowd need only to look east to Wisconsin, which has no plans for similar legislation. In fact, that state — which a recent Harvard study ranked first in the nation in binge drinking — is even considering lowering the legal drinking age to 19 for active-duty service members.
Who knows? That might help boost recruitment.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.