Chatting with Imus on MSNBC at 8:45 ET this morning about the travails of the CBS Evening News and the advent of Rick Kaplan as its executive producer, media maven Howard Kurtz observed: "I don't know if this is attributable to Rick, but it seems to me that in the last week the show has a little bit of a harder edge, a little bit of a faster pace."
That set Imus off on an anti-Couric tirade: "It's unwatchable. And it's unwatchable because she's unwatchable. I'm sure she's a nice lady, but I mean . . ."
View video here.
KURTZ: "She certainly wasn't deemed to be unwatchable when she was #1 at the "Today" show for over ten years."
IMUS: "That's a completely different deal. Doing little stupid chit-chat stuff on an idiotic morning show on NBC has nothing to do with sitting down and doing the news. That's big-boy television."
KURTZ: "Katie Couric, like Charlie Gibson during all the years when he was on 'Good Morning America,' also interviewed presidential candidates, heads of state and all that as well as cooking and . . . "
IMUS: "This is pathetic. This is unbelievable."
A bit later, Kurtz passed along a bit of condescension toward Middle America from Rick Kaplan: "He told me . . . he thinks that there is a chunk of the audience that, for whatever reason, is not comfortable getting their news from a woman at 6:30 and this is one of the attitudes they have to change."
The MSM: bringing cultural enlightenment to the benighted reaches of flyover America. Kaplan might want to start in Imus' neck of the woods.
Contact Mark at mark@gunhill.net
