So Not Getting It

If it weren't so pathetic, I would be laughing. The East Coast looks down on the West Coast and the pair look down on the rest of the nation. They, the anointed ones, know the truth and by listening to them the rest of us will be enlightened and led to true peace and contentment, suckling quietly at the teat of the government which determines what is best for us.

We've got cute, perky, Katie Couric, the talk show airhead who was co-opted to be the next Dan Rather/Walter Cronkite/Ed Murrow but with heels and a push-up bra. Declared to have instant gravitas, she takes the helm of CBS Nightly News and immediately drives the Big Eyeball into the deepest recesses of the network news ratings basement. But, that's OK, because she's cute and perky.

Now we've get this incisive piece from the next generation of main-stream media, the mainstream media blog! They interview the perk-mistress and find that she's getting down and dirty. She's going where she was meant to be, the field where the real reporting action takes place.

"The Great Unwashed Middle of the Country"

Yes, she really said that! If you ain't New Yawk City, you are "unwashed"! And the Daily Beast doesn't even falter at that. But, where does she go to find out what middle America is really thinking?

That’s why Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.

She's going to find the "mood of the midterms" in Chicago? Philly, Boston and New Brunswick are mainstream America? Wow, there's no limit to how open minded this cutie really is. She's taking risks here to inform the properly bathed and coifed New Yorkers what's really what out there.

When she was chatting up young voters at Boston College last week, her eyes lit up and a broad grin emerged—not the stern face of the prompter reader.

And if you really want to find out what the young adults of America are concerned with, there's no greater melting pot than Boston College!

But Katie isn't afraid to tackle the issues either. There's nothing superficial or banal about her reporting. She goes where the people need her to go and then she digs deep. To keep anyone from passing out in anticipation for the evening news, she passes her pithy observations continually through Twitter:

In the meantime, she is smitten with her 100,000 followers on Twitter. “My friends accuse me of becoming a bit of a Twitter addict,” says Couric, who has tweeted about everything from the pumpkin latte at Starbucks (she hates it) to catching the new Facebook movie (Mark Zuckerberg seems like a “jerk”). 

Maybe I'm not so unwashed as she thinks, but then again maybe I am. I love pumpkin lattes at Starbucks (I had one once a couple of years ago) and I don't think a self-made thirty-something billionaire can be too much of a jerk.

I'm betting that despite the awed adulation of the Daily Beast, we'll be seeing perky Katie disappear from the network within the next couple of years. The only qualifier is that it won't be because she is such a monumental twit, but rather because the three major networks are simply going to give up on attempting to shape the rest of the unwashed nation into their perception of what we should be.