Long before the 2008 presidential campaign, I found CBS News Anchor Tracy Flick Katie Couric annoying. Like Reese Witherspoon‘s character in the 1999 flick Election, Couric comes across as smug and self-righteous. It seems she believes that her prominence means she knows better than the rest of us. That’s one reason I didn’t watch the entirety of her interview last fall with the then- Republican nominee for Vice President and, for a time, had taken an Obama-supporting friend’s word that Couric had asked Palin about her record in Alaska.
How wrong I was.
After hearing a bit of Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, I decided to investigate this. You see when they talked about Couric‘s interview with her, Palin offered
It seemed to me that she didn’t know anything about Alaska, about my job as governor, about my accomplishments as a mayor or a governor, my record.
So, I decided to review the transcripts and found that Couric didn’t ask a single question about Palin’s record in office. You’d think that when a politicians suddenly vaults onto the national stage, the media would be interested what she had previously accomplished in state office. But, Katie Couric showed no such interest. No wonder some have defined her treatment of this reforming Governor with a record of bipartisanship as part of a pattern of media malpractice.
The malpractice may go deeper than Couric’s failure to ask Palin about her record. Couric and her team at CBS may have edited out some of Palin’s more thoughtful answers to focus on her seemingly air-headed ones. Ann Althouse observes than in her book,
Sarah Palin criticizes CBS for editing long interviews into the most damaging soundbites and making her look stupid and irritable. . . . There is a lot of material in the book making assertions about all sorts of trenchant comments Palin supposedly made. Palin says she was asked the same questions over and over in an effort to elicit a bad answer. She says that some of her answers were clipped after some simple beginning and before she delved into details that would have made her look smart and knowledgeable
That blogress offers what she calls “an easy solution” to see if this is so: “Release the unedited video.” (Via Instapundit who adds that Palin “should have brought her own camera.“)
No wonder I find Couric so smug, so self-righteous. She claims all she’s doing is reporting the news, but in reality she wants to make the news and shape our perceptions of political figures.
A real reporter would ask not just about a candidate’s stance on various issues, but about her record and would not edit an interview to make the candidate look bad, but to present her views accurately.
This is not to say that Palin did not handle certain questions poorly. Even she acknowledges she could have done a better job with some of the questions. This is to say that Katie Couric showed no respect for Sarah Palin. I might be less dismissive of the CBS News Anchor if she didn’t put herself forward as a non-partisan purveyor of the news and instead acknowledged her bias as we in the blogopshere do.
On matters of integrity, we bloggers, even the most partisan among us, are far ahead of Katie Couric. And yet she wins awards for her “journalism.” A sign that the problem is her profession goes far beyond this one woman’s partisanship. No wonder she and her fellow anchors are rapidly losing audience. And people are going elsewhere for news and information.
So, in other words, you uncritically accept all of Palin’s assertions, with no evidence whatsoever to back them up, and glom onto conclusions that Couric is thoroughly unprofessional and biased. Because she did her job and ask relevant questions, that Palin happened to handle badly.
From what I’ve heard, this is quite the pattern in Palin’s book. Take no responsibility for her own performance, blame everyone else, and basically just settle scores. What an inspiring figure!
Um, Tano, three things
(1) I checked (and) even linked above the transcript of the Couric interview.
(2) Expecting comments like your own, I italicized an expression about what appears on the parts of the interview Couric did not air. That expression includes the verb, “may.” That’s a conditional word, hence, my inclusion of Althouse’s request that the tapes be released. Even the italics did not cause you to see the conditional nature of that sentence.
(3) “From what [you’ve] heard” means what members of the left-wing commentariat are saying. And they’re choosing to focus on her bitterness.
With points (1) and (2), no, I’m not using Palin’s remarks to glom onto Palim’s assertions and accuse Couric of being unprofessional and bias. For (1) I did my own research to investigate a point Palin made. From (2) I’m requesting that the tapes be made public so I can do my own research to investigate another point.
Now, I wouldn’t have had to say all that had you read the post and understood my points. But, knowing how some of our critics tend to respond, I was prepared for such a jaundiced reading of my remarks.
“She claims all she’s doing is reporting the news, but in reality she wants to make the news and shape our perceptions of political figures.”
If I understand your response correctly, you simply forgot to put the conditional in this summary sentence too, right?
Tano, why is the conditional necessary in that sentence? Couric didn’t report Palin’s record as Governor. That’s a fact.
And a serious omission.
Oh and by the way, when will you apologize for falsely assuming I just glommed on to Palin’s conclusions?
Sounds like the Chump in Chief to me. You’re right, not a damn thing inspiring there.
Gotta love a blogger so thin-skinned that he demands an apology every other post!
So let me get this straight: unlike most of the rest of the voting and thinking population, you couldn’t bear to watch the Palin-Couric train-wreck when it happened back in 2008. Now, having read her self-serving, whitewashed version of that story, you go back and look… and like Palin herself, you decide the best course of action is to scream and tantrum and do your best to convince us all that it never happened, or it was all some evil plot:
“No, no, no! It couldn’t have been that bad! She couldn’t have sounded that stupid! Somebody must have done something to make her sound that stupid! It wasn’t her fault!!”
“She didn’t really not know the name of a single newspaper or magazine that she read. Katie Couric just asked her a“gotcha” question!!” (a question that is literally Journalism 101, by the way, not that you’d know anything about that). “Or maybe she re-edited her answer?!! Oh, please, something!!”
And Charlie Gibson, he was “mean” to her, too with another tough “sexist” question? Why not demand raw footage of that interview and her incomprehensible answer about foreign policy?
[Um, william, did I mention Charlie Gibson in this post?]
It’s never Palin’s fault, is it? In your mind, she is perpetually a victim of someone or something else besides herself. The right loves to claim that the treatment of Palin is sexist. What’s truly sexist is the way that men like you continue to bend over backwards to make excuses for her, to apologize for her idiocy, to literally try to rewrite her history. It’s honestly disgusting.
[Um, william, did you read the post? I said she handled questions poorly.]
Her record in Alaska? You mean her lies about “the bridge to nowhere”?
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed7/idUSN3125537020080901
[um, william, no lie here, she changed her mind. Even the Alaska Democratic Party acknowledged that she helped kill the bridge]
Her ties to oil lobbyists?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/01/palin-lobbyist-ties-include-oil-firms/
[so, she has ties to lobbyists. What politician doesn’t? Question is, do they influence her? And considering she junked a pipeline deal that benefited the big oil companies, doesn’t seem they had that much influence over her.]
Troopergate?
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6004368&page=1
[um, william, note the date of that link, October 11. She was cleared a few months before the election. Not to mention that Branchflower who conducted the investigation is a colleague of long-time Palin foe and Obama supporter Hollis French.]
Her rabidly anti-Semitic pastor?
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13098.html
[rapidly anti-Semtic? hardly. The claim is based entirely on her pastor bringing someone with strange views on shul to church, not on his views.]
Oh, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of all of these news sources being terribly biased against her, too.
You’re actually lucky she didn’t get more questions about her “record.” Though she certainly had her way of lying when she did.
[So, wow, william, you’re reducing her record to a string of articles that raise questions about her associations and claims, but don’t address any of her legislative accomplishments, don’t mention her cooperation with Alaska Democrats or her exposure (often with Alaska Democrats) of corruption in her own party. Quite selective here. But, thank you, your ignorance helps prove my point about Palin-haters.
And anyway, once again, you missed the point of the post. It wasn’t Palin’s record per se, but that Couric never asked about it. And nowhere in this comment do you show that she did.]
Instead of your painfully childish “demand for the tapes,” maybe you want to actually take a step forward, into 2009. Except, ruh-roh, there’s not much good stuff to talk about her record there either. But of course, Sarah’s not a quitter after only 18 months in office. That’s all someone else’s fault. Again.
[Wrong again, Sarah was in office for 32 months. Check your facts. And please, please tell me what this demand for the tapes in childish? Not much good stuff in her record, hardly. All you’ve done is help make my point. You show that all you know about her record is the liberal/MSM spin, focusing on a few things, most based on incomplete information.]
How truly pathetic that this is the best conservatives have. I mean, some part of you must feel debased clinging to that sad, sad straw that that the Couric interview was somehow cruelly edited to make Palin look stupid? Objectively speaking, really, you reek of desperation. Isn’t it embarrassing that every other word out of your mouth about her (when it’s not an empty cheer) is an apology or an excuse or a defense?
[How truly pathetic it is that you repeatedly comment to my posts without addressing their points, spending so much time on a blog whose bloggers, in your mind, “reek of desperation.]
PS: it’s weird, I thought of Sarah Palin as Tracy Flick as soon as I first saw her on TV, with her smarmy-perky, narcissistic, take-no-prisoners hunger for power. Except, then again, Tracy Flick actually was clever enough to do her homework.
Katie Couric was a “color commentator” for the big news guys at the local affiliates. She was perky and had a high “Q” factor which finally caught the eye of the Today Show people and rocketed her into the Oprah seat on the couch. She did interviews from cooking to crooks to con-men.
The fact is, Katie Couric, Jane Mrs. Gary Trudeau and Barbara Walters were all really adept in the Larry King school of journalism. But it was her “Q” rating that got her the job. (The “Q” rating is that certain something that attracts viewers.)
Katie has been trying to fill the shoes of a top journalist for some time now and her “Q” factor does not make up for her lack journalistic talent. She has no portfolio, or as the Democrats say, no gravitas.
I am never really certain what qualifies for being “bitch slapped” but I think Couric “bitch slapped” Palin.
william, you are a bonehead.
I pulled this from your Ben Smith, The Unbiased, link and I present it in the same spirit you presented the links.
You can always find something said by somebody that throws gasoline on a fire.
Please go back to your basement and take your playground debating goofiness with you. We know that you have declared Palin too stupid to come in out of the rain. We know that Couric and Gibson didn’t touch Obama with even a feather duster because Obama’s bona fides are greater than all the previous presidents combined. We know that Obama has an IQ higher than God’s and that his hope and change and mission were clearly laid out and stand above The Ten Commandments, The Constitution and Ben and Jerry’s in importance, power and redemption.
We just continue to believe that the long knives were brought out on Palin. The fact that she has come back for more should thoroughly delight you. After all, Maddow, Matthews, Obermann, et.al. have creamed the conservatives in the ratings game. And the news divisions at ABC/NBC/CBS are growing by leaps and bounds. Liberal books dominate the best seller lists. Congress is so overwhelming liberal and supported in their mission that they have saturated us with open hearings and people are begging them to rush legislation through rather than taking so long.
william, you guys have the world on a string. Why worry about Palin and the fantasies of conservatives? Let us revel in our misery.
The left was so desperate to smear Palin that by the end of the week, they were hyping a phony story about her getting booed at a book signing. Pathetic.
Ira Forman is out of touch with true Jewish values. Those may be the values of his fellow democrats, but it that was all that Jews believed in, we would have disappeared as a people a long time age.
Why are you guys letting Liberal Democrats even comment on this blog? Condesending, fill of hate and spite for almost everybody – why associate with them? Give them the respect they give everybody else – drop them like a lead balloon!
Gotta hate a troll who’s such a blazing asshole in every post.
Because we all know the liberal media would never be biased. They wouldn’t make up stories of “racist” Palin supporters allegedly shouting “Kill him” at her rallies.
Why no mention of the hard hitting questions Chairman Maobama got? Oh yeah. THERE AREN’T ANY. Or maybe the embarrassingly sad and pathetic train wreck called an interview of Plugs Biden?
Nope. No bias there. Totally on the up and up.