Entertainment and sex appeal are
paramount in corporate news
Katie Couric Sign-Off on CBS Evening News
She asks her audience for sign-off suggestions:
How about "Keep swallowing the propaganda"?
Couric's job is not that different from Bush’s
She’s just another huckster promoting
the myth of American magnanimity
A spruced-up phony singing
from the corporate song-sheet
while the imperial bandwagon rides roughshod
over everything in its path
After all, the networks care less about propping up their shaky credibility than they do about winning the ratings game. That’s why they nabbed America’s sweetheart to replace the "oh-too-liberal" Dan Rather.
She’ll keep the viewers glued to their Lay-Z-Boys while the news jumps from the carnage in Baghdad to 5 minutes of selling erectile dysfunction drugs to flaccid American males.
Couric is already dolled up and ready for the evening coronation. They coaxed her into shedding a few lbs. for her debut and she’s bound to be coifed and lacquered for the media extravaganza.
The country hasn’t seen this much hype and hoopla since the final episode of Dallas ("Who shot J.R.?") 20 years ago.
Couric’s astonishing rise to the news-world’s most exalted position tells us a lot about the devolution of TV news.
The corporate mandarins make no apologies for their superficiality; they’re looking for "Star Power" not serious reportage or, gawd help us, journalism.
They’d rather have the "girl next door" softening up the crowd for the soap suds commercials than waste their money on some doughty, sour-puss with Cronkite-type gravitas.
"Katie" is their kind of girl. What she lacks in depth and sincerity, she makes up for in "perkiness" and feigned empathy.
She’s everything a media big-shot could want; an engaging, non-threatening soccer mom who can hold her own at a baseball game or a state dinner.
She fills the void between the glitzy dames at FOX News and the Coulter-type "she-wolves" who appear regularly on the political talk shows.
Couric’s promotion is just the latest effort to transform the nightly news into a 30 minute hodge-podge of business-friendly claptrap.
Her job is to obscure the ghastly effects of American foreign policy while her corporate-backers pitch their behemoth, coal-burning SUVs during intermissions.
We can expect to see the same fear-inducing images of swarthy Middle Eastern-looking males on Katie’s half-hour, but tempered with the motherly assurance that "all is well" because big brother is still looking after us.
Couric’s main task is to soften the blow whenever an errant American bomb incinerates another 50 or so Iraqis or when some socialist reformer in Latin America gets bumped off by the CIA.
That’s when she’ll peer Diane Sawyer-like into the camera lens and nod sympathetically, a favorite tactic of TV newsmen everywhere.
Let's face it; her job is not that different from Bush’s. She’s just another poll-tested huckster promoting the myth of American magnanimity while the US army carries out their latest rampage.
If she’s good at what she does, the viewers will walk away feeling better about themselves and their country. Its all perception management, the facts really don’t matter.
Good luck, Katie; you’re just what the country needed, another spruced-up phony singing from the corporate song-sheet while the imperial bandwagon rides roughshod over everything in its path. Mike Whitney/Smirking Chimp
Katie Couric: the Pretty Face of Corporate Propaganda
For instance, consider the “news” that Katie Couric, CFR member, who “was trained in hard news, and she still occasionally does a solid job of grilling interviewees,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times, will leave NBC and head for CBS, where she will be an “anchorwoman,” managing editor, and the “new homecoming queen of news,” or rather government script reading.
CBS is owned by the “entertainment” leviathan Viacom and was previously owned by Westinghouse, manufacturer of military and nuclear hardware. Frank Carlucci of Carlyle Group fame was director of Westinghouse from 1989 until it merged with CBS in 1997.
Entertainment and sex appeal are paramount in corporate news and Couric, known for wearing short skirts and showing off her legs, is an ideal choice to feed America its daily dose of transnational corporate and governmental propaganda.
It is rumored Couric is dating one of the Reyes brothers from Reyes Holdings LLC, a Republican billionaire who owns a large distribution company that services McDonalds.
The Reyes brothers are no strangers to the corporate media—they sit on the board of the Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, WGN, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, and many other media outlets. In short, Katie Couric, in her professional and personal life, is a consummate insider.
In regard to the news, we can expect more of the same, only it will be delivered with sex appeal over at CBS.
One has to wonder if workers at CBS will cut away the front of the anchor desk, as they did when Couric appeared on Jay Leno’s show “to expose her legs while she interviewed American Idol judge Simon Cowell and Austin Powers star Mike Myers,” according to the Wikipedia write-up on Couric.
Thus demonstrating that the “Couric Effect” and tedious sexuality as a form of entertainment is more important than the news or the prospect of a well-informed public. Information Liberation