If Only News Was Strictly Cooking Segments...
When someone is truly desperate, he or she will lash out at anyone, however irrelevant.
Look, I'm no fan of Dan Rather. He's got the style of a good-ol'-boy mixed with the temperament of a six-year-old girl in a beauty pageant who just lost first place. On top of that, he's got a record of playing fast and loose with the facts, which eventually caught up with him when one of the other, better journalists who had been assigned to prop him up decided to follow in his footsteps and just punt on what should've been the most carefully-researched story since Watergate.
But all that said, he's an actual journalist. Perhaps a bad one; perhaps a fatally flawed one. Perhaps the truth is that he was from a pre-Watergate era where all journalists took facts a bit more casually. Perhaps journalism changed, and Dan Rather stayed the same. Either way, it would be difficult to look at Dan Rather's career and say he didn't, at some point, practice journalism.
Enter Katie Couric, a woman whose two largest journalism accomplishments in her lifetime have been the fastest crash into the ratings basement in anchor history, and the view up her ass everyone had for the colonoscopy story she did following her husband's death.
(I would only note here that it is not generally required to surrender your body to cover a story on a health issue. Many described this as courageous. To me, it felt uncomfortably like exploitation of grief for ratings. I can write a story to convince you that colonoscopies are important without necessarily needing you to personally see my intestine. At any rate, choose to give her the benefit of the doubt if you like, but having a camera shoved up your rectum in no way qualifies you to anchor the evening news.)
Katie Couric is a lot of things. Most of them good. None of them are "journalist." Among other people equally qualified to anchor the evening news: Kevin Federline, Ernie (of Sesame Street fame), a chicken sandwich.
CBS's attempts to make Couric look tougher have only made her look silly. Sending Couric to Iraq to report on the situation there would be a fine thing to do, if she had any experience as a foreign correspondent, or a correspondent, or a journalist, prior to doing so. The idea that Iraq is the place to cut one's journalistic teeth would be silly--but if course, that's not what they were doing. CBS was hoping for a more subtle slight of hand: if we send her to Iraq, well, she must be a journalist, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. You don't learn to be a journalist by getting shot at. You learn to be a journalist despite being shot at. When I covered the World Trade Center attacks in New York, I already was a journalist. I kept my head and did my job through it, not because of it. I didn't just decide to pick up a pen that day and go play journalist until I looked tough.
And so there is discomfort when Katie Couric is critical of Dan Rather's journalism, because Katie Couric wouldn't know journalism if she shoved it up her ass for ratings.
Look, I'm no fan of Dan Rather. He's got the style of a good-ol'-boy mixed with the temperament of a six-year-old girl in a beauty pageant who just lost first place. On top of that, he's got a record of playing fast and loose with the facts, which eventually caught up with him when one of the other, better journalists who had been assigned to prop him up decided to follow in his footsteps and just punt on what should've been the most carefully-researched story since Watergate.
But all that said, he's an actual journalist. Perhaps a bad one; perhaps a fatally flawed one. Perhaps the truth is that he was from a pre-Watergate era where all journalists took facts a bit more casually. Perhaps journalism changed, and Dan Rather stayed the same. Either way, it would be difficult to look at Dan Rather's career and say he didn't, at some point, practice journalism.
Enter Katie Couric, a woman whose two largest journalism accomplishments in her lifetime have been the fastest crash into the ratings basement in anchor history, and the view up her ass everyone had for the colonoscopy story she did following her husband's death.
(I would only note here that it is not generally required to surrender your body to cover a story on a health issue. Many described this as courageous. To me, it felt uncomfortably like exploitation of grief for ratings. I can write a story to convince you that colonoscopies are important without necessarily needing you to personally see my intestine. At any rate, choose to give her the benefit of the doubt if you like, but having a camera shoved up your rectum in no way qualifies you to anchor the evening news.)
Katie Couric is a lot of things. Most of them good. None of them are "journalist." Among other people equally qualified to anchor the evening news: Kevin Federline, Ernie (of Sesame Street fame), a chicken sandwich.
CBS's attempts to make Couric look tougher have only made her look silly. Sending Couric to Iraq to report on the situation there would be a fine thing to do, if she had any experience as a foreign correspondent, or a correspondent, or a journalist, prior to doing so. The idea that Iraq is the place to cut one's journalistic teeth would be silly--but if course, that's not what they were doing. CBS was hoping for a more subtle slight of hand: if we send her to Iraq, well, she must be a journalist, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. You don't learn to be a journalist by getting shot at. You learn to be a journalist despite being shot at. When I covered the World Trade Center attacks in New York, I already was a journalist. I kept my head and did my job through it, not because of it. I didn't just decide to pick up a pen that day and go play journalist until I looked tough.
And so there is discomfort when Katie Couric is critical of Dan Rather's journalism, because Katie Couric wouldn't know journalism if she shoved it up her ass for ratings.