KC Messterpiece

There is an article in the NY Times called "Is it a Woman Thing, or is it Katie Couric?" and it's all about how the ratings for CBS' evening news have stayed very low since she took over the anchor's desk. Apparently, CBS has always been in third place among network news shows, but Couric is even lower in the ratings than her predecessors (including scary monkey-human robot prototype, Dan Rather). (If you want to read the piece, it's here, but you have to have the free registration account. Fag elitists!)

Well, is it that viewers don't like women as news anchors? Or, do people just dislike Katie Couric, who has been to the plastic surgeon's office just a couple-ten too many times and now appears as though her facial bones are eating their way out through her skin? She is the white Michael Jackson. Or, perhaps, she is the black Michael Jackson. I am confused.

And, I digress. I'm sure the answer to the Times' silly question (which was rhetorical, I believe) is: it's both.

Surely, the majority of viewers for the evening news is male. Older male. If you can't get old men to watch Dan Rather and his crewcut, then what is the draw with Katie Couric? She is haggish, shrill, unceasingly upbeat. And, she has a vagina--we think--which puts her beyond the comprehension of a large, albeit rapidly dying, segment of the American population. Unfortunately, misogyny is virulent, and middle America is chock-full of woman-hating assholes who learned it from their dads (and, if they are Republicans, their moms).

But then, Katie Couric herself is so objectionable, or ought to be, to all Americans regardless of geography or upbringing. Most, I would argue, don't like Katie and her goddamn bubbles of personality, like farts smelling of pancake batter, emitting from her thrice-rebuilt, red grease-smeared maw. The evening news is depressing, or so I've heard, and Ms. Couric reads it and talks about it as though a big fat black man is going to bust in any second and make us all chuckle with his banal weather jokes.

Couric's contribution to my consciousness is and always will be her "super-duper extra special report: TEENS HAVING SEX ALL THE TIME AND YOU CAN'T STOP THEM...except I, Katie Couric, will tell you how to stop them." She then proceeded to interview her daughter and her daughter's friends for a while, then interviewed herself in a mirror, and then had other people talk about her and her fabulous parenting skills--it was all very home movies. I recall thinking, "Katie Couric has spawned??" and then going online to purchase Apocalypse life insurance.

The special (and it was truly "special" in a short bus kind of way) basically amounted to: Katie Couric just recently found out that teenagers have genitals. And, she can't remember who told her this, teenagers like to touch their genitals, and have other people touch them, too. And Katie is such a cool mom that, you know, she's cool with that. And she wants her teenage daughter to know--and she wants YOU to know--that she's totally, like, cool with that. Cool? Cool. She's cool.

That was back when she was being groomed for the move into "serious" news. And, it obviously worked. In fact, she got so good at being "serious" that just a few months ago she attacked a cancer victim and her husband for an hour and accused them of making money and gaining fame by having the wife contract bone cancer.

But that's all gamma rays under the skin. The question now is, "what's wrong with CBS?" The answer that makes most sense is that Couric, like coffee, is best before 10 AM. Nobody wants to have a big, happy-because-it-gets-you-high cup of Katie at 6 PM after a long, shitty day at work. News is depressing, so should you be. Everybody feels mean at 6 PM; American media deliberately stokes the fires of intolerance and small-minded hatred just before and during prime time. That goes some way towards explaining the fact that every prime time show is a mean-spirited comedy or else is about gruesome murder. In the morning, however, the brain barely functions, everybody gets high on coffee, and there exists an optimism predicated upon the slim possibility that your place of work might be closed today for some reason. And in that delusional, stupidly happy little world, Katie Couric is the minstrel queen.

The solution is clear: stop watching TV.