There's considerable debate in the press about Katie Couric's problems at CBS. Do people prefer to hear the news from white men? Is she suited to the light fare of morning television but not to the seriousness of evening news? Is she breaking ground -- the first woman on this block and thus unsettled and it shows? Is too much being expected too soon? Or is she simply insufficiently versatile?
While researching before writing It's All Politics, I was fortunate to interview Douglas Edwards, the pioneering television journalist who anchored CBS Evening News from 1948 to 1962. He spoke of the behind-the-scenes politics, "ticklish matters," "tempers," value of tact," and need for "occasional bluntness." Among the pearls of wisdom he passed on to me is one that Katie Couric might seriously consider. He asked why my parents had tuned in to his T.V. program every night. I relayed from them to him that it was his ability to talk to millions of people as if he were speaking to each of them individually. "That's a compliment," he said and told me this story:
When I first started at WSB, a man named Lambdin Kay, a radio pioneer who'd started in the 1920s told me, "Remember, Doug, that although you're working on a 50,000-watt radio station that covers the Southeast -- as the (Atlanta) Journal covers Dixie like the dew -- when you talk into these microphones you're talking to groups of two people, maybe one -- three at most. Don't' think of talking to a million or half a million people. Remember you're talking to one or two. Communicate with them. Talk to them. Talk personally to them.
"I think that was good advice. Don't you?" Edwards asked me as if we were old friends. "Because when you sit down in front of a TV camera as I do every day... and the audience is 8 or 12 million people... you'd go out of your mind if you decided you had to accommodate all of them, so I'd rather think I'm talking to a few friends."
Now, if Douglas Edwards could do that with the serious news of his day (eventually with 30 million viewers), surely Katie Couric can do the same. I'd be one of the last to say that gender doesn't make a difference when it comes to credibility -- that's another blog. And surely Couric is up against that. But the larger gender issue is the tendency for women to allow themselves to be reinvented because who we are, we're told, simply isn't good enough.
And then there is the issue of genuineness. Distance, phoniness and indifference are what we're getting daily from our government; we certainly don't need it in the evening news. When women learn to be who they are, that's when they shine. I've gotten a bit jittery before major speeches following male speakers who related to the audience like the "We're guys here at the bar" kind of repartee seen Sunday on the journalist roundtable segment of Meet The Press. That's when my husband has reminded me, "Just give them Reardon on persuasion." Why? Because Reardon on persuasion, negotiation or politics is who I am. And the audience senses that.
My experience as a professor of communication and hard earned expertise tell me that being other than who you are in terms of style or substance is a recipe for failure no matter who you are. Gravitas make-up isn't an asset either. Gravitas is earned, not painted on. It takes time. Couric should take a page from the "France 24" news where journalists look like themselves. Their make-up and lighting isn't for effect, it's there to compliment the real person. It's refreshing.
Al Gore and John Kerry decided not to be themselves and look what happened. A few lessons from their regrets wouldn't hurt either.
Just give them vintage Couric -- with substance -- and things will improve. And if they don't, you won't look back thinking, "Why wasn't I me -- the person who got the job in the first place?"
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P.S. What's needed is a distinction between opinion on content and on delivery. One belongs at the feet of CBS and the other Couric and CBS. The vitriole aimed at Couric directly is something else and frankly strikes me as over the top as I don't know any awful things she's done. I'm as frustrated as the next person about weaknesses in news reporting. Tim Russert aggravates at times but does quite well at others. Jon Stewart, comic genius that he is, hardly EVER has female guests but I don't hate him for it. A little separation of the issues and examination of personal angst would go a long way here.
See also.