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Jan 28 2008 10:12AM EST

How Katie Couric is Like Rip Van Winkle

I'm late on this, because I've been away, but Caitlin Flanagan's essay in the current issue of The Atlantic is the best entry so far in the large and ever-growing literature of Katie Couric dissections.

Writing as a fan of Today-era Katie, Flanagan nails both the nature of Couric's appeal and the reasons that appeal didn't translate into better ratings for CBS Evening News.

CBS chief Les Moonves, she writes,


hired Katie based on the assumption that she had a huge and adoring fan base that would follow her anywhere. But by definition, the kind of person who has time on her hands in the morning -- who has nothing but time, time that must be filled, endured, killed -- is the kind of person who is in a race against the clock by early evening.

As for Couric herself, Flanagan says her mistake was in not realizing that, by 2006, Today had become "a far more culturally significant program" than any of the evening newscasts.

Because Katie remembered the old world, the one in which the most-respected news was broadcast at the end of the day, she thought that she was taking a more powerful job.... She made the kind of mistake that women a generation younger than hers probably wouldn't have. She spent her time gunning for a position that had been drained of its status and importance long before she got there. And what she has learned, the hard way, is that her climb to the top has been not a triumph but the act of someone who slept through a revolution.
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