Slate's Shafer Mocks Blonde Bond of Couric, Sawyer, and "TV's Aryan Sisterhood"

February 22nd, 2006 9:10 AM

Slate "Press Box" columnist Jack Shafer has a pictoral essay up today on "TV's Aryan Sisterhood," where he mocks the hair of anchor-babes from Paula Zahn to Katie Couric to Diane Sawyer. (He links to an old MRC page for a pic of Katie the Brunette.) This page (5 of 9) cracked me up:

I imagine that at one point in her life, the 60-year-old Diane Sawyer of ABC News was an honest blonde, but is there any middle-aged woman alive whose hair naturally looks like this? A relatively late arrival to the blond gang is NBC's Andrea Mitchell, 59, who looks like an Earl Scheib paint and body shop hosed her hair down with a gallon of Gold Leaf Metallic Clearcoat.

I also enjoyed his description of the "glistening hair doughnut" of MSNBC's Alex Witt. It's okay. He also balances it out by mocking male TV hair:

To achieve the look of Aphrodite, the Greeks yellowed their hair with saffron, colored powders, and mud. Other historical dyes include pigeon dung and urine, Pitman writes, while moderns rely on lemon juice, pool chlorine, and commercial concoctions. But not since late-1970s Brit-punks started soaking their hair in communal vats of hydrogen peroxide has anybody been quite as stridently show-biz blond as Chris [Matthews].

And the Rita Cosby line is too, too wicked:

How big are Fox lips? When Rita Cosby switched from Fox to MSNBC, a construction crane was called in to move hers, which resemble a pair of oily, red eels mating angrily.