Phlegm Fatale? Left-Wing Salon Tells Katie Couric to Get Mean, 'Grow a Pair'

July 10th, 2007 8:19 AM

Rebecca Traister at left-wing Salon.com (yes, endure the leftists' commercial) brings the feminist scolding to Katie Couric for granting a whiny, bitter interview to New York magazine, including the odd detail that she slaps male producers for using medical terms for lung mucus. Traister wants to see a "mofo" in action:

Suddenly, the woman who used to refuse to talk to reporters about her astronomical salary and hard-bargaining skills, who unapologetically drove the high rate of turnover among "Today" show producers, and who radiated a steely self-confidence, cannot shut up about everything that's gone wrong since she left NBC for CBS! Oh, girlfriend: Get a grip....

Slam a table; grow a pair; be the mean motherf---er we know you can be. Tell them all that everything is going just exactly as you planned, that you couldn't be more proud of your program or more confident about your decisions. It might be a crock, but if you start to believe it, then maybe the rest of us will too. And maybe that's the only way, at this point, that you can win.

She added:

Would Barbara Walters consent to a confessional about how things spun out of control on "The View"? Forget it: That woman could face the camera, while Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O'Donnell barbecued each other's livers behind her, and assure viewers that everyone was best friends, with the low pulse of a serial killer.

And would Diane Sawyer, whose "creamy insincerity" was immortalized by the New York Times, chew over her own shortcomings with a reporter after she lost ABC's evening news berth to testicularly advantaged Charlie Gibson? Hell, no. She would smile gorgeously and convince everyone that everything turned out precisely how she, Diane Sawyer, wanted it to.

In other Couric commentary:

-- At Newsday.com, TV writer Verne Gay does a very interesting tea-leaf reading of Katie's interview headlined "Sputum Wars."

-- The CBS "Public Eye" blog, dedicated to bringing transparency to CBS News, files another weak item merely noting that the Couric interview exists. (That's not how new Public Eye writer Matt Felling saw Katie a little while back, eh? When he urged CBS not to hire "Carson Daly's Cool Mom?")