Sep 5 2006, 2006


It’s not surprising that CBS would hand over the Nightly News to talk-show chatterbox Katie Couric. After all, the networks care less about propping up their shaky credibility than they do about winning the ratings game. That’s why they nabbed America’s sweetheart to replace the "oh-too-liberal" Dan Rather. She’ll keep the viewers glued to their Lay-Z-Boys while the news jumps from the carnage in Baghdad to 5 minutes of selling erectile dysfunction drugs to flaccid American males.

Couric is already dolled up and ready for the evening coronation. They coaxed her into shedding a few lbs. for her debut and she’s bound to be coifed and lacquered for the media extravaganza.
The country hasn’t seen this much hype and hoopla since the final episode of Dallas ("Who shot J.R.?") 20 years ago.

Couric’s astonishing rise to the news-world’s most exalted position tells us a lot about the devolution of TV news. The corporate mandarins make no apologies for their superficiality; they’re looking for "Star Power" not serious reportage or, gawd help us, journalism. They’d rather have the "girl next door" softening up the crowd for the soap suds commercials than waste their money on some doughty, sour-puss with Cronkite-type gravitas.

"Katie" is their kind of girl. What she lacks in depth and sincerity, she makes up for in "perkiness" and feigned empathy. She’s everything a media big-shot could want; an engaging, non-threatening soccer mom who can hold her own at a baseball game or a state dinner. She fills the void between the glitzy dames at FOX News and the Coulter-type "she-wolves" who appear regularly on the political talk shows.

Couric’s promotion is just the latest effort to transform the nightly news into a 30 minute hodge-podge of business-friendly claptrap. Her job is to obscure the ghastly effects of American foreign policy while her corporate-backers pitch their behemoth, coal-burning SUVs during intermissions. We can expect to see the same fear-inducing images of swarthy Middle Eastern-looking males on Katie’s half-hour, but tempered with the motherly assurance that "all is well" because big brother is still looking after us.

Couric’s main task is to soften the blow whenever an errant American bomb incinerates another 50 or so Iraqis or when some socialist reformer in Latin America gets bumped off by the CIA. That’s when she’ll peer Diane Sawyer-like into the camera lens and nod sympathetically, a favorite tactic of TV newsmen everywhere.

Face it; her job is not that different from Bush’s. She’s just another poll-tested huckster promoting the myth of American magnanimity while the US army carries out their latest rampage. If she’s good at what she does, the viewers will walk away feeling better about themselves and their country. Its all perception management, the facts really don’t matter.

Good luck, Katie; you’re just what the country needed, another spruced-up phony singing from the corporate song-sheet while the imperial bandwagon rides roughshod over everything in its path