Caitlin Flanagan has a nice essay in the latest Atlantic about Katie Couric, the Today Show, and Couric's failure as the CBS Evening News anchor. Flanagan does a good job of explaining why the fluffy-unwatchable morning shows actually mean a lot to a lot of people, and why Couric was so perfect for that role (the piece is ostensibly a review of a part-hit-job Couric biography). But the best part is Flanagan's tidy put-down of the evening news:
That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. ... No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon.That CBS and Couric didn't realize this -- and that newspapers have wasted so much ink (also see: Dan Rather's fall from grace, Tom Brokaw's retirement, etc.) discussing an irrelevant institution that few under age, say 58, care about -- is as devastating an indictment of the news media as any stock-price or circulation drop.
