Newsweek puts Katie Couric on the cover this week, and the cover story by Marc Peyser and Johnnie Roberts is easy, breezy, and totally free of any troublesome analysis of whether Couric is fair and balanced enough to attract non-liberal viewers. The most eye-opening line comes from former CBS reporter Marvin Kalb, responding to Andy Rooney's nobody's-happy-about-Katie rant on the Imus show:
"I remember when CBS hired [former game-show host] Mike Wallace and gave him the morning news," says Marvin Kalb, a former CBS correspondent who is now a senior fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. "You should have heard the men's room conversation. My God, what have they done? They destroyed the Murrow tradition—all that. I think the negative spin on Katie Couric is unfair, and I think she is going to prove those people wrong. So take that, Andy Rooney, and screw you."
Newsweek also found another old CBS hand who had a Katie slam: "In their efforts to bring in a younger audience, they hired a lot of good-looking women," says Bill McLaughlin, a former CBS correspondent who is now a professor at Quinnipiac College. "Their bench looks like the front line of the Ziegfeld Follies, and now they've brought in an aging Rockette."
There's also no mention of liberal bias in the shorter Newsweek sidebar on Meredith Vieira.
And there's also no mention of liberal bias in the "Newsweek On Air" radio clip on Couric with Newsweek's Peyser and former CBS and ABC reporter/anchor Marlene Sanders (the mother of CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.)
