Invasion of the pod-casters
Wednesday's announcement that Katie Couric is leaving NBC's "Today Show" to anchor the "CBS Evening News," far from being a celebratory development for journalism, women or news consumers, merely seems to signal that perhaps the dreaded feel-good, happy-talk news has at last completely infected the medium from bottom to top.
It's not a huge secret that print journalists don't have, shall we say, exceedingly effervescent esteem for many of their supposed counterparts in broadcast. And people like Katie Couric, chipper and fresh from the morning shows, represent the worst of the lot–they appear not as journalists, but as celebrity personalities out to grab viewers and ratings while drawing extravagant salaries, and if someone happens to turn away informed, swell, but that's not the point.
What was great about the evening news back in the day was that anchors and producers didn't feel the need to reduce every story to a sappy lead, talk to viewers like friends or children or juxtapose the profoundly important and the utterly trite to keep viewers' attention while thereby rendering the aggregate phony and pointless.
In short, it wasn't local news. You just couldn't picture Peter Jennings delivering a serious story on the Iraq war one moment, then going, "And those wounded soldiers in Walter Reed will probably be wishing they still had those limbs to cheer on the racers in this year's Wiener Dog Nationals!" without changing tone or emphasis and delivering superfluous smiles through it all.
And that was how it should be, with the evening news as a place to turn for well-delivered and relatively bullshit-free information on at least mildly consequential things going on in the nation and the world–not morning show-style blather on fad diets, parenting tips and dressing to camouflage one's (hypothetical for some of us, of course) figure flaws.
It's not about wanting to get your evening news from a "daddy figure" with the all-important gravitas, as Maureen Dowd mentioned in her Wednesday column–it's about wanting to get your meaningful information from a source that appears to take it seriously.
It's also about how when women come in (case in point: Elizabeth Vargas), the content and delivery always seem to suffer to play to their supposed "strengths" and "areas of interest."
Not that it's a function of gender–I don't watch morning news, but I'm sure there are just as many male "anchors" who are complete tools I wouldn't trust to deliver my pizza much less my information.
Also, not all female broadcast reporters inspire such visceral scorn–some, like Kate Snow or Martha Raddatz, still perform their jobs like professionals, not like coddled little girls trying to redefine the profession at the expense of quality work for the sake of misguided feminism.
For women in fields dominated by men, doing the job well sometimes means doing the job according to norms and standards set by their male predecessors whose work defined the field. It is not oppressive to hold women to the same standards and ideals for performance, and any woman who argues that position is probably mediocre or worse.
A male social worker who performs his job with empathy or a male designer with a refined eye for beauty is not caving and performing his job like a girl–he's performing his job like a good social worker or designer.
Likewise, it is not "sexist" to prefer anchors with pleasant voices who can keep their cutesy comments to themselves and refrain from smiling like condescending mother hens at official sources and viewers alike.
I suppose it all comes down to this: Whatever your gender, if you suck, just be quiet, go away and stop polluting the national news media. At the very least, just stop the hair-frosting, smile-bleaching and deep-tissue tanning already–you don't match yourselves.
It's not a huge secret that print journalists don't have, shall we say, exceedingly effervescent esteem for many of their supposed counterparts in broadcast. And people like Katie Couric, chipper and fresh from the morning shows, represent the worst of the lot–they appear not as journalists, but as celebrity personalities out to grab viewers and ratings while drawing extravagant salaries, and if someone happens to turn away informed, swell, but that's not the point.
What was great about the evening news back in the day was that anchors and producers didn't feel the need to reduce every story to a sappy lead, talk to viewers like friends or children or juxtapose the profoundly important and the utterly trite to keep viewers' attention while thereby rendering the aggregate phony and pointless.
In short, it wasn't local news. You just couldn't picture Peter Jennings delivering a serious story on the Iraq war one moment, then going, "And those wounded soldiers in Walter Reed will probably be wishing they still had those limbs to cheer on the racers in this year's Wiener Dog Nationals!" without changing tone or emphasis and delivering superfluous smiles through it all.
And that was how it should be, with the evening news as a place to turn for well-delivered and relatively bullshit-free information on at least mildly consequential things going on in the nation and the world–not morning show-style blather on fad diets, parenting tips and dressing to camouflage one's (hypothetical for some of us, of course) figure flaws.
It's not about wanting to get your evening news from a "daddy figure" with the all-important gravitas, as Maureen Dowd mentioned in her Wednesday column–it's about wanting to get your meaningful information from a source that appears to take it seriously.
It's also about how when women come in (case in point: Elizabeth Vargas), the content and delivery always seem to suffer to play to their supposed "strengths" and "areas of interest."
Not that it's a function of gender–I don't watch morning news, but I'm sure there are just as many male "anchors" who are complete tools I wouldn't trust to deliver my pizza much less my information.
Also, not all female broadcast reporters inspire such visceral scorn–some, like Kate Snow or Martha Raddatz, still perform their jobs like professionals, not like coddled little girls trying to redefine the profession at the expense of quality work for the sake of misguided feminism.
For women in fields dominated by men, doing the job well sometimes means doing the job according to norms and standards set by their male predecessors whose work defined the field. It is not oppressive to hold women to the same standards and ideals for performance, and any woman who argues that position is probably mediocre or worse.
A male social worker who performs his job with empathy or a male designer with a refined eye for beauty is not caving and performing his job like a girl–he's performing his job like a good social worker or designer.
Likewise, it is not "sexist" to prefer anchors with pleasant voices who can keep their cutesy comments to themselves and refrain from smiling like condescending mother hens at official sources and viewers alike.
I suppose it all comes down to this: Whatever your gender, if you suck, just be quiet, go away and stop polluting the national news media. At the very least, just stop the hair-frosting, smile-bleaching and deep-tissue tanning already–you don't match yourselves.
posted by Holly at 12:19 AM
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