The Chronicle‘s Kyrie “MeMo” O’Connor is lamenting the rumored departure of Katie Couric from CBS News:
I have been angry all day about the reports that Katie Couric will be forklifted out of her CBS Evening News job in the near or not-so-near future.
Here’s the joke about that: You literally could not pay me to watch her newscast. For one thing, I am among the millions of people who are still at work when she comes on. For another, I get my news other ways, from print and Internet and TV, but not at that exact moment in my day. And I wouldn’t even if I could. I watched her news show when she started, so thrilled to have a woman in that post that I overlooked every news muscle in my body, all of them twitching this is a mess.
From the beginning, her show looked like it was put together by a committee. A committee of well-meaning people, maybe, but not people with vision. It reminded me of everything I’ve fought off in very similar meetings for the past 15 years.
But I cheered on Couric, because I wanted her to succeed, or any woman to succeed, even with a stacked deck like that.
Anyone who tells you a man would have been shown the door by now, even in that mean TV game, is a fool. Women in the public eye are still treated so much worse than men it’s stunning.
MeMo was never very forthcoming about who made the boneheaded decision to send a features reporter to impersonate a Katrina refugee some time ago. But this post raises an interesting possibility — perhaps it was a committee “of well meaning people… but not people with vision.” Probably dominated by men!
