Tuesday, September 5, 2006
Katie Hath Come
Did you see Katie Couric in her inaugural? The hype was so heavy this highly experienced TV performer was nervous, her voice gripping, her tension palpable. They layed such a trip on this poor woman she hardly had a chance. “They” is the producers, who are the worm in the apple in the media. Behind the scenes, not open to scrutiny, the on-air types get the flack, but it is the producers who enrage the public with the paper thin quality and bias of news reports.
This wasn't the installation of the Katie, rather it was a drastic, wrongheaded format change of the best of the national news shows. The people behind the scenes, wanting to be the stars, came up with all sorts of “ideas” that weren't ideas at all. With all the hype about Couric, the CBS evening news didn't even look like a news show, it looked like a compilation of the work of novice TV news producers and their very special “concepts” — a mishmash of shallow TV magazine stories and a gimmicky “free speech” segment. You can see what it has done to the art world — now self-centered conceptualism has come to TV news.