As Katie Couric announces she is jumping from NBC’s “Today” show, which she’s co-hosted for 15 years, to the anchor slot of the “CBS Evening News,” Edward Wyatt gamely argues in Thursday’s Business Day how Couric actually has roots as a hard news reporter (“Coming Back to Hard News”) and carried those over to her Today show segments, which Wyatt repackages as “tough assignments.”
“But she has showed that she can handle tough assignments with aplomb and has been unafraid to take certain risks.”
Those admirable “risks,” in Wyatt’s view, are composed of Couric putting a condom on a model of a penis, bringing a camera to her own colonoscopy, and criticizing a former Klansman.
“When Magic Johnson revealed his H.I.V. infection, she used a model of a penis to demonstrate how to use a condom. Two years after her husband's death in 1998 from colon cancer, she took along a camera crew as she underwent a colonoscopy, part of a weeklong ‘Today’ segment on the disease.
“And barely six months after starting in the job, she faced off with David Duke, the former Klansman who was running for governor of Louisiana, in an interview that turned volatile as she confronted him with his earlier statements about race and pressed him to reconcile those statements with his more placid campaign statements.”
“On that day, few people questioned her credentials in reporting the news.”
Just how tough is it to criticize a former Klansman, anyway?
Wyatt doesn’t mention the liberal Couric’s not-so-“confrontational” statements in 1992 about another justifiably reviled figure, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro:
“Considered one of the most charismatic leaders of the 20th century....[Fidel] Castro traveled the country cultivating his image and his revolution delivered. Campaigns stamped out illiteracy and even today, Cuba has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world."
And Couric doesn’t have a habit of confronting controversial Democratic politicians. Here is a question Couric posted to Hillary Clinton before the 1992 election:
"Do you think the American people are not ready for someone who is as accomplished and career-oriented as Hillary Clinton?"
You can read and see more of Couric’s liberal bias courtesy of the Media Research Center:
For more bias from the New York Times, visit TimesWatch.
