Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Habemus News Reader!

Warning: What you are about to read has an extremely high snark content by volume.

Today the secular press crowns a new pope, Katie Couric, or at least a bishop with the chance to become pope (if she can consistently lead in the ratings). Are you having a coronation party too? Never has so much been made of so little since...well, the Valerie Plame "scandal".

Earlier today I was watching the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz on IMUS talk about Couric, and he spared no superlative as to the importance of this event. I do have to say that I'm impressed by Kurtz's job. He talks about television. And it's a paying gig! Only in America could someone get paid talking about news anchors.

I think the Katie hype shows there's an innate need for royalty. We don't have a royal family and President Bush is too controversial, but we do have our network news anchors - even though one of them was recently shown to wear no clothes (Dan Rather). I must say I was surprised that while Kurtz professed to have no idea if Couric was a liberal, making him the only one, he did say that that there is a question about whether Rather let his ideology affect his broadcast in the faked memos scandal. Hey, wow that is something! That's like the Kremlin admitting Kruschev was too brutal during the Hungarian uprising.

So, let's live-blog the first Couric broadcast, already in progress:

She's advertising some sort of "free speech" segment. We already have that: it's called blogs and without them I doubt we'd be having this "free speech" segment.

Hmm...they're showing a snippet of some guy saying that he's tired of frothy-mouthed pundits screaming. He sounds loud and frothy.

Uh oh...first black mark for Katie. In a twenty-two minute broadcast where every second is precious she is showing pictures of Tom Cruise & Katie's baby. Edward R. Murrow is spinning in his grave.

"Send us a send-off for Katie!" Sigh. Everything feels so manipulative these days. You can just see the white board: "Hey Katie, you must have something interactive. Think O'Reilly and his emails. You have to get people to own the program by making them a part of it."

"Well, okay, how about they come up with a line for how I close the show?"

"Excellent!"

Hmm... it seems she's allowing Rush Limbaugh to tape a "Free Speech" segment for later in the week. It's obviously a bone to conservatives and we should be grateful, should we not? But somehow it feels anticlimactic. Rush has suffered the slings and arrows of the media for many years and now he gets 90 seconds. She'd say that makes it a lose-lose for her, damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, but it reminds me of how Hillary got religion briefly on the abortion issue, how she appeared to struggle with it in an effort to court a few social conservatives. On the one hand, you can't help but be impressed by the humility it takes for Hillary or Couric to court the opposition, those whom you despite. But on the other you can't help but be repulsed by the nakedness of ambition. I have a measure of sympathy because politicians and broadcasters shouldn't have to apologize for doing what will support their continued their existence. I'm sure Commonweal (and perhaps First Things) would not have a blog but for their perception that it will increase readership, but that's no reason to think less of Commonweal (there are other reasons, but..).

Most American voters desire neither a reckless disregard of their opinion nor a reverence of it as if it were Holy Writ. But of late we've been whipshawed between the inflexibility of a George W. Bush and the Machievellian slipperiness of a Bill Clinton. In '08 it'll be interesting to see if the pattern will break and we'll have someone like Ronald Reagan, who seemed to fall into neither extreme and knew when to duck a fight (i.e. Beirut).

So with that I'll sign off.

Courage.