Katie Couric blames everybody

CBS News anchor Katie Couric complained to the Israeli press in Tel Aviv Monday that "many viewers are afraid of change."

Maybe it's all those drills they made us do in school, you remember, when the teacher would scream, "Walter Cronkite has retired!" and we all had to get under the desks.

"I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance," Ms. Couric continued, "and realizing what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable."

Let's just call a halt to this kind of thing. Let's not shout "Sexism!!" every time an accomplished woman falls short of a high professional goal.

Katie Couric is an exceptionally talented broadcaster who was wildly miscast as an evening news anchor, who took the job knowing it didn't play to her strengths, who believed the CBS executives when they said they wanted to do a new kind of evening news show.

She didn't look past the big contract and the ego boost to see that the CBS executives were promising her something that was never going to happen. CBS was never going to allow the Evening News to turn into a showcase for a personality.

"I'm not doing today exactly what I've been brought to do," Ms. Couric said Monday, "my chance to express myself is fairly limited in the 22-minutes format."

The executives made the mistake of thinking they could overcome a certain demographic group's dislike of news programs by hiring an anchor who's very well-liked by that demographic group.

But those people still don't like news programs, and they're not going to like Katie Couric much longer if she doesn't stop calling them sexist and saying they're afraid of change.

America Wants to Know keeps an assortment of psychics and fortune-tellers on the payroll, which might explain how we were able to predict this outcome very early in the post, "Bob Schieffer's Elegant Exit."

You might also like to read the October 2006 post, "Saving Katie Couric," along with "The coming bloodbath at CBS News," "The logical conclusion of CBS News" and "Saying something nice about Nancy Pelosi."

Copyright 2008

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