Katie Couric's Internet Lecture: 'In This Digital Age, It's So Easy to Be a Hater'

May 19th, 2010 3:22 PM

Katie Couric's commencement speech on Sunday at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland wasn't very political. (Video here.) Near its end, after a call for being kind to your friends and business colleagues, there was a call for civil discourse:

Be kind macrocosmically as well. In this digital age, it's so easy to be a hater. Elevate the conversation online, and in life. Don't let 'civil discourse' become an oxymoron.

As if CBS and Couric have never been uncivil, passing along recently without discouragement that protesters of Arizona's immigration law were "smearing refried beans in the shape of swastikas on the windows.”

Couric's speech was very quote-heavy, and in the end, she listed all the famous people who wrote her back with advice for graduates -- Al Gore and Eric Holder, Michael J. Fox and Drew Brees, Sheryl Crow and Chelsea Handler, Condi Rice and Gen. Ray Odierno. She also mentioned former New York Times and Newsweek feminist columnist Anna Quindlen as "one of my favorite writers."