Katie Couric

Once more, my real life has conspired to keep me from blogging. Here's a post that was supposed to be finished yesterday, but, well, as you can see, it's only now seeing the light of day.

Via the Washington Post:

Whatever it was, Katie Couric did a brisk, engaging job of getting the strange new show off the ground last night as, at long last -- and after one of the most relentless hype hurricanes in history -- she debuted as the first woman to be solo anchor of a major network newscast. K-Day had come at last!

Couric occupied a chair that once belonged to Walter Cronkite and, later, Dan Rather, both of whom did newscasts that were much, much newsier. Yesterday, though, was apparently a no-news day in the opinion of Executive Producer Rome Hartman, the staff and Couric herself, since the half-hour began with a "60 Minutes"-style piece on the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The real purpose of this report was to show off Lara Logan, the intensely telegenic reporter who serves as foreign correspondent. She went undercover in Afghanistan, much as Rather had done many many years ago. But as a woman, Logan said, her Taliban hosts "insisted I cover everything but my eyes."

The story was in fact largely about her -- about how dangerous it was to do the story, about what a big, "unprecedented" exclusive it was.

I'm not going to judge Katie Couric on her very first day, but if we're seeing 'the chair of Walter Cronkite' occupied by someone who is only offering info-tainment, I'll...

I won't actually do anything. I don't watch TV news very much. Sometimes I tune into CNN if I know something ongoing is unfolding that I want to keep up on, but I get most of my news from NPR, which I listen to almost religiously.

Blogs, online newspapers, and magazines (perhaps a smattering of C-SPAN) make up the vast majority of my media consumption. I imagine that there are many people like me - and many more that tune into MSNBC, Fox, or CNN if they want news, not the networks.

Tuning into the evening news on CBS (or ABC or NBC) was something that you just did back before there was cable news. You didn't have a choice. The news was only on TV certain times in the day. Miss it and you had to go buy a newspaper from stores that weren't open anymore. But now you have 3 24-hour news channels to choose from.

Katie Couric was put on 'the chair of Walter Cronkite' because CBS thinks that for some reason she'd be able to reverse (or at least slow) that trend. She won't be able to and neither could anybody else.

Katie Couric Evening News Media Infotainment