Man o
man. What is going on here? CBS News used to be a venerable source of the truth. Edward R. Murrow. Walter Cronkite. Robert Trout. Dan Rather. Those were real news reporters and real news anchors. No more. These days, CBS is the
American Idol of television newscasters. It tried to be progressive, hiring Katie Couric as network television's first woman solo nightly-newsanchor. But CBS wasn't progressive enough to take her seriously. And she, apparently, isn't ready to take herself seriously. She is, quite literally, afraid to be a woman of substance.
This is Katie, wannabe woman of substance who would just love to be taken for a newswoman of stature, in a widely-disseminated publicity photo for The CBS Evening News. Right next to her is the airbrushed, 40 lbs skinnier Katie that the CBS publicity department faked up on Photoshop, and then distributed in its place:
What's up with this? Shame. Crippling self-doubt. A terribly distorted self-image. A self-flagellating refusal to be who she really is before the world. Both Katie and CBS News claim they had nooooo idea! that the publicity department was faking up its multi-million dollar news anchor. Ho-Kay!
But it's also a terribly degraded image of what a news organization should be. A debased and degraded CBS News organization that, underneath it all, really thinks Katie Couric should put on little white go-go boots and a minidress and go shimmy with Tucker Carlson somewhere, instead of doing her job of finding, reporting, and analyzing hard news. A CBS News organization that yearns for the ratings garnered by fiction-TV, and will blur the lines of news and entertainment just to get them. A CBS News organization that, even as we speak, is probably secretly trying to woo Jon Lovitz away from his fast food sandwich contract.