Anchor's Away

Jeff Bercovici is on vacation. Guest blogger Sean Elder submits:

As Dan Rather reminded us, old journalists don't even fade away. They come back to get one last word in, like Columbo going out the door, cigar in hand, "Just one more thing..."

The current issue of New York magazine features 60 Minutes' mainstay Morley Safer weighing in on Katie Couric's trip to Iraq and Syria. (Is she still there? Did somebody forget to pick her up?)

"I think if you're a young reporter, and to me she's a young reporter, it's certainly important to be where a major story is happening," he told the magazine's Jada Yuan at a screening of Feast of Love. "I don't think there's anything wrong with Katie Couric going to Iraq and doing a perfectly good job. I think there's something terribly wrong with the bullshit hype that's surrounding it."

(Um, he said a bad word!)

It's not surprising that Safer would feel free to opine about the doings of one of his colleagues, let alone the network that employs them both - even if it does feel like a late hit. Couric's mid-east trip was a ratings fiasco and garnered negative publicity for her and producer Rick Kaplan (meaning, I guess, that those who didn't watch her didn't like it).

And New York has done well by feasting on her remains (the CBS Evening News is stuck in third place, behind NBC's Brian Williams and ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, who maintains a tight grip on the number one spot). Joe Hagan's profile of Couric this summer did more for the magazine than the anchor and made some of us think they might start covering the media more assiduously. (Still waiting.)

Couric's one-year anniversary has come and gone. Kaplan, who helped boost the ratings of both Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, has yet to work his magic on her. Some good press couldn't hurt. Right now she seems stuck with being a pinata for the local press.

by Sean Elder