Here it is 2006, and the big news is – wait for it – the old networks have gone and picked a woman to read the news all by herself.
Many publications have devoted reservoirs of ink to the business of Katie Couric jumping ship from NBC’s Today show to the CBS Evening News.
This, mind you, is 85 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Apparently, it takes that long for Americans to accept hearing the news from someone in a skirt, pearls and heels without a man sitting next to her in case she gets the vapors and faints.
Couric, 49, will replace the estimable Bob Schieffer, who is 69 and has filled in since the retirement of Dan Rather, now 74.
That’s TV math for you: XX-20 = XY.
Gawker.com, the ne plus ultra of snarky Web sites, has something of an obsession with Couric and Couric’s fantastic, never-to-be-encased-in-hose-even-in-the-dead-of-winter legs and Couric’s vacations and whether they include surgical touch-ups.
Designed by founder Nick Denton as a superb procrastinating tool for people who love to loaf on the job, gawker.com loves being nasty about pretty, successful, relatively youngish women (well, Couric looks young) doing far better in life than the people with not-so-great jobs and the time to cruise snarky web sites.
On gawker.com, there’s never any mention of Schieffer’s ties, though there is furious love for Anderson Cooper.
With a dwindling audience for broadcast evening news, totaling about 29 million, and many of the viewers candidates for Levitra, Couric seems a smart, fresh move. It’s unclear whether this will be enough to get younger people to detangle from their devout love affair with the Internet, especially when Couric may appear oldish to them, like Lindsay Lohan’s mother or something, but a network exec can dream.
Still, it’s amazing that Couric is news. Women are all over the place on the tube, covering wars, floods, you know, the traditional guy flak-jacket stuff, but back in the studio there’s a need to hear the lead-ins from daddy or an avuncular sort in a sweater vest.
Not that other countries are so far ahead. In Italy, women are allowed to read the news – provided they take off their tops.
In France, all that liberte, egalite and fraternite works as long as the citizen is white and Gallic. It was only recently that French networks started using broadcasters of African and Arab descent. Martinique-born Audrey Pulvar, speaking to The New York Times, revealed that television executives told her that “the French public is not ready” for a nonwhite face and “I already have a black and I don’t need another one.” That was only a few years ago. Today, she reads the news on the state-run France 3. Again, it made news.
It’s hoped that Couric will be judged as her male colleagues have been, by her work and not her wardrobe decisions (she has fabulous taste, anyway), though I have my doubts. Life is a locker room, as I’ve remarked before, and it’s hard for many people not to get catty about women doing better than they are, even those who are deserving of such success.
Couric has put in her time, and she’s shown intelligence, tenacity, charm and, yes, a certain amount of sparkle required for the trade.
Sure, she’s done her share of dumb things on Today but, then, hasn’t everyone?
In an ideal world, if she does her job well and the ratings improve, Couric should be allowed to keep the post well into late middle age, when most women tend to mysteriously vanish from screens small and large.
The true news would be that Couric is allowed to mature, even wrinkle, and still be doing the news at the same age as Schieffer.
c 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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