Whats Unfair About Questioning The Relevance of Her Resume?
Katie Couric is clearly a big audience draw for daytime. But I consider the quetion of whether or not she can be taken seriously in the nighttime anchor slot a very valid one. I don’t watch the show regularly but what I do recall seeing is a lot of fluff. After her husband died she seemed to take on a more serious mien that translated to her journalistic coverage, e.g. raising public awareness of colon cancer and taking the fear factor (if not the ick factor) out of colonoscopy screening. If Dan Rather had spent much of his career doing cooking segments, soft-pedaled celebrity interviews and anagram contests (that’s on the agenda for Katie and Matt on the Today website as I write this), well, I’d be questioning his gravitas as well. Gravitas means ‘high seriousness’ – it is not a gendered word. It’s valid to look for seriousness from a candidate for the anchor slot if seriousness is what sells. Her current and past success notwithstanding, the totality of Couric’s career doesn’t point
