Feral Beast: What Katie did: gob-smacking

Monday, July 9, 2007

What Katie did: gob-smacking

Here is America's first solo female evening news anchor, Katie Couric. She has seen her ratings slide precipitously, so is rather high-strung these days. The NY Post reports her slap-happy reaction to a medical term slipped into her script for the nightly news. According to New York Magazine's Joe Hagen, the network star playfully bitch-slapped one of the show's writers for including the word "sputum" in a report about tuberculosis. “I sort of slapped him around,” Couric admits, referring to Jerry Cipriano, a news editor.

Well, "sputum" is more specific than the post-AIDS catch-all term for the squeamish: "bodily fluids". What made Couric so spitting mad about this particular term? Was it the pronunciation? That she would have to share the set with a reference to nasty gunk being coughed up? The news tells us about the world in all its nastiness. Katie, get over it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Are we supposed to feel sorry for this celeb news anchor, sad Diane Sawyer wannabe who gets millions a year? Kinda feel like slapping her, frankly.; July 9, 2007 at 9:06 AM

Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.