Given the chance to interview Katie Couric, I wouldn't ask her what newspapers she reads. I'd want to know how she understands her role as anchor, and why she thinks it's appropriate to express opinions on controversial issues of the day.
For that's just what she's done on the subject of gun control, expressing disappointment that Pres. Obama didn't raise it in his SOTU.
Describing her dissatisfaction in her "Notebook" yesterday, Couric asserted that PBO's failure to raise gun control put a "cloud" over the SOTU.
View video after the jump.
Of course we know Couric's a liberal. But really, I'd be fascinated to hear her justification, as an anchor, for taking sides on the issues.
KATIE COURIC: There's a website called Wordle that generates "word clouds," a sort of artistic rendering of text.
How many times a word appears determines its size in the cloud - so, it's not a shocker that "jobs," "people" and "future" dominated the image generated from President Obama's State of the Union address.
But there's talk this week about a word that wasn't in the speech at all: guns.
The Tucson tragedy cast a pall over the evening, and set the night's subdued tone. On Monday, we reported 11 law enforcement officers were shot and killed in five states in the span of just two days.
Howard Dean said he agreed with the President, that gun control is a divisive issue and there's probably a better time and place to address it.
Still, given all the recent headlines and calls for better enforcement of laws to keep guns out of the wrong hands - that missing word has generated a cloud of its own.
That's a page from my notebook.
I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.
