The Anchoress
Regular readers know that after much public trepidation about Katie Couric’s takeover of the CBS Evening News, I’ve made it a point to try to be even handed about the broadcast. I give Couric high marks for daring to allow all sorts of interesting (or, to some, maddening) voices in the FreeSpeech segment, and I like the Couric and Co blog a lot. She’s got the “fun Katie” thing going on with the Word of the Day and Quote for the Day bits (and they’re smart blog items, too, because they keep people like me checking in at least once a day) and many of her Notebook segments have been pretty good, considering they are so brief. It is hard to be penetrating or even insightful in 60 seconds.
That said, today’s notebook, on yesterday’s Amish school tragedy, is just…really not helpful. In fact it’s a desolate bit of the sort of feeeeeeelings journalism that I have been dreading ever since Anderson Cooper fell to pieces in New Orleans last year.
Says Couric: (I’m transcribing quickly so this is imperfect): Some stories are so painful, you can’t chase them out of your brain, and that’s how I feel about this story – another slaughter of children that has happened too many times. I remember the 16 little children from Dunblane, Scotland, killed at school ten years ago and the class photo of their smiling faces and bright eyes, oblivious to the evil that would take their lives. We look at our children and ask, “what if…” My 15 year old daughter watched the news last night, the ten year old had a piano lesson and did not. I was glad she did not see it. I didn’t want her to have yet another reason to feel unsafe. I’ll talk to them both tonight, but like so many parents … I don’t know what I’m going to say.
I understand that Couric is trying to bring the “human element” to the news broadcast, and there is nothing wrong with a professional journalist expressing sadness about a terrible story, but there is a vibe to this thing that sets my teeth on edge. It makes it sound like the nation and a whole youthful generation are both stranded in a vast ocean of hopelessness, with no possibility of rescue. It’s all desolate feelings without substance, and in that sense it is almost emotional porn; “I’m feeling bad and I’m wallowing in it and feeling completely helpless, join me fellow parents as I flail toward a receding shore.”
Actually, if she’d said she was flailing toward a receding shore, I might have liked that better; it would have at least implied that there was a shore out there we could all swim toward and eventually reach. The wide-eyed “I don’t know what we can tell our children,” is meaningless. If one is going to take that view of the world, in all its tragedy, then why not just tuck your doomed children in, like the Irish mother in Titanic, and tell them a tale of Tir na Nog and wait for the end.
How about this: “I’ll tell them some of the hard truths we don’t always like to teach, but sometimes must. That life is not fair, and it turns on a dime. That the world is not a safe place and it never has been, and that’s why when we are looking out for each other, we are doing the best we can to keep ourselves safe, as well.”
Okay, maybe not the wisdom of the ages, but for heaven’s sake, it’s so much better than the trembling lip and the waving hankie.
C’mon, Ms. Couric. I’m coming to respect you for a variety of reasons, but you’re not getting the big bucks to be our emotional depth charger.
Recaptured via The Wayback Machine
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In