Minnillo and Menounos
Ping
Now I know why I didn't watch. Cringe Level doesn't begin to describe what this show sounded like.
Katie was quite...chatty.
Vanna White could have turned the pages better.
Columnist at CBS Marketwatch takes the first in house shot at Katie. Interesting.
Beautiful!!
Nice job on the comment.
They just never learn
Watched the Science channel. Some show about why certain planetoidal bodies in our solar system are no longer considered "planets" and all the confusion over a proper definition.
Some times, smart people can be REALLY dumb.
I had a much better time laughing at them than I would have with Kooky Katie...
Thankfully, I didn't watch.
In what might have appeared, at first, to be a clever idea, the final segment explored the nightly sign-off words of some illustrious news people. Then, it offered the images of mythical buffoon newsmen Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) and Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell). That was nothing less than moronic.
Couric then invited the audience to write in and suggest an appropriate sign-off. "I know we'll have a lot of fun reading them," she smiled. (Watching on my office television set, I winced all over again.)
How about:
I'm Katie Couric, And I've Just been Fired.
I was wondering how bad she was going to bomb, considering that the CBS evening news is only watched by the 65-85 demographic.
I watched it, which is a "Man Bites Dog" story in its own right. Friedman remarks on some cringe-making moments, and in retrospect that's what they were. But I confess I hardly noticed since, to me at this point, the entire experience of watching broadcast journalism is just one big cringe.When watching a play one suspends disbelief and pretends along with the actors that what is being portrayed is real. If the actors step out of character the suspension of disbelief is broken and the audience laughs. And when one watches a performance of the news, one pretends that the reporters are knowledgeable and objective. But in fact the reporters are "reporting" things FReepers already know, and they are consistently, predictably tendentious.
The fundamental fallacy of broadcast journalism is the assumption that broadcast journalism is important. The republic went on for a long time before broadcasting was instituted and even before radio transmission/reception was invented. And the fundamental fallacy of journalism in general is the conceit that journalists are objective when in fact the are full of themselves. We all are fullof ourselves, of course - but some of us make a serious effort to actually do useful things instead of merely second guessing those who do.
And the selective reporting of only the things which went wrong in particular ways is nothing but a second guess. Twenty times as many Americans are killed in traffic accidents as are killed in Iraq; the selection of the deaths in Iraq to the virtual exclusion of the routine slaughter on our highways is an obvious bias. There being no obvious way to spin those traffic deaths as an indictment of the Bush Administration.
Journalism is simply a particular lens through which an image of part of reality (and part fantasy) can be viewed. Journalism overemphasizes the importance of the recent and of the atypical and the negative. On any given day the predominant living human reality is that most of us get up in good health, work or do whatever else we planned to do, eat 3 square meals, and sleep in a comfortable bed. And on any given day our ancestors are still dead. That is the big picture - none of which makes the news.
I'm reminded of the movie, "The Three Cabelleros" (Not the Disney cartoon), with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short playing Lucky Day, Dusty Bottoms and Ned Nederlander.
Lucky Day: Reading telegram: "Three Amigos, Hollywood, California. You are very great. 100,000 pesos. Come to Santa Poco put on show, stop. The In-famous El Guapo."
Dusty Bottoms: What does that mean, in-famous?
Ned Nederlander: Oh, Dusty. In-famous is when you're MORE than famous. This man El Guapo, he's not just famous, he's IN-famous.
Lucky Day: 100,000 pesos to perform with this El Guapo, who's probably the biggest actor to come out of Mexico!
Dusty Bottoms: Wow, in-famous? In-famous?
Minnillo and Menounos
"A READER RESPONDS (about my column Tuesday on the change at the top of Viacom): "Tom Freston's firing will make no difference to Viacom's future. Viacom's already struck the iceberg and this move is just re-arranging the deck chairs." -- Walter Abbott
Flathead: The peculiar Genius of Thomas L. Friedman. . .
The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:
I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins
Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.
My vote for Katie's signoff:
"Not detonating General Motors Pickups, I'm Katie Couric"