Katie Couric is Engaging
This Howard Kurtz piece on the totally amazing and serious Katie Couric is getting some attention for this unfortunate passage:
. . . Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.
Therein lies a key reason why Couric has sometimes struggled in her current job. She’s always seemed constrained by the rigid, 22-minute format, a far cry from her freewheeling Today performances over a decade and a half. So she has devised ways to slip out of her $15 million-a-year prison—launching a Web show, engaging on Twitter, and getting out in the field.
Well. If you can name the crime that will get me committed to a $15-million-a-year-prison, I will endeavor to commit it posthaste. But perhaps the reason she’s struggled is contained in her quote: the middle of the country suspects she regards them as hobnailed dirt-smeared dullards. It fits with the idea that real America - smart, credentialed, urban, sophisticated - exists in a thin crust on either coast, with the rest of the country a parenthetical insert in the national narrative. Unwashed. Criminey.
No, amend that. “Real America,” according to the coastal cultural viziers, is middle America, and that’s the problem. "Better America" is what you get in New York. But only between certain cross-streets.
(By the way, the line "the great unwashed" came from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian writer who also gave us the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.”)
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Sep '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
It was the best of slimes; it was the worst of slimes....
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Since when are Philly, Boston, and Jersey the middle of the country?
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
James, I have to defend Katie. I grew up in Chicago. When I moved to New York City years ago, what struck me was how clean everyone was. If you've been here I'm sure you know what I mean. It was only then that I realized how lucky I was to have escaped the "unwashed middle" of this country.
May '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Or even Chicago. So she's going to travel to large, urban areas to get a fresh perspective? Maybe she's confused the difference between accent and perspective...
Jun '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
You know, James, I don't mind what she said. Let her report back to her cronies on the east and left coast, "have you heard, there's unwashed MASSES there in the middle, quite unwashed, quite." That way, she and all of her clown-bag friends stay the hell out of my state and the surrounding states. Let them think what they will just so long as they don't come anywhere near me....
I heard there's monsters out there in the middle, dragons too. Better keep away coasters, just to be safe. Quite quite, rather yes.
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Just another vain pixie who has convinced herself that she has sway over the un-enlightened.
Has she looked at CBS News ratings? As we used to say in High School Athletics: Scoreboard!
$15 million per year contracts [strike]Stone walls[/strike] do not a prison make.
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Adam, I've found the people of New York to be as clean, or not, as anyone else. I will note that the Bronx has a neighborhood called "Throggs Neck," which sounds like something you get when soap is infrequently applied.
May '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
I had the (unfortunate) experience of hearing Ms. Couric deliver the commencement address at Case-Western University in Cleveland in May. What vapidity. It was like having your appendix taken out with a hockey stick - and sans anesthesia. If you want to flush 27 minutes of your life down the toilet it's available on YouTube.
Oct '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Well, a long career of talking about the actual middle of the country (where we keep all our guns and religion) as if it wasn't part of the country at all tends to close a few doors.
Sep '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
The way she talks about it, it sounds like a lunar expedition in hopes of finding vast water reserves.
Sep '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Don Imus has characterized her best “Kidding, affectionate, she’s a cute little rodent, more like a Minnie Mouse, not a sewer rat in New York. By the way, that could have gone right by, the little rodent at CBS. You didn’t have to call attention to it.”
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
James Lileks:
Did her limo driver help her escape or did she devise and execute the plan all by herself? In either case, as one of the great unwashed, I marvel at her bravery.
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Did she not see the "great unwashed" when they showed up in D.C.? And she still couldn't "divine" the mood?
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Speaking of rodents, and apropos of James's reference to "It was a dark and stormy night," I give you the 2010 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Molly Ringle:
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
James Lileks:
By the way, the line "the great unwashed" came from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian writer who also gave us the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.”) ·
I thought Snoopy gave us the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Aug '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Doesn't Couric's statement remind you of Harry Reid's revealing opinion of Americans when he referred to "...the smell of the tourists on a hot day in Washington"? The best thing we can do with elites is encourage them to render opinions.
Here's my favorite Bullwer-Lytton: "The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know." - Patricia E. Presutti, 1987 winner.
Aug '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
As a child, well until 22 or so, my ma would stand me in the sink and scrub me with a brillo pad so I could be as clean as the folks in Manhattan. Having my skin scraped off right there in ma's kitchen will stay with me forever . I called it "Hell's Kitchen" , guess it stuck.
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
"Therein lies a key reason why Couric has sometimes struggled in her current job. She’s always seemed constrained by the rigid, 22-minute format, a far cry from her freewheeling Today performances"
Sounds like Kurtz is channeling Dave Axelrod. The problem, you see, isn't that few care for what she has to say, it's that she needs to say it in different settings at greater length.
Does Kurtz think Obama's "more cowbell" approach worked? And what do these people have against editors?
Edited on October 27, 2010 at 2:12amAug '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
$15 mil huh? Comes out to about $10k per viewer by my reckoning. CBS news' return on investment is quite stimulus-like, no?
Oct '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
You know you're a hopeless elitist when you consider visiting Boston as a way to mingle with the slobbering masses.