CBS Snooze
I wanted to watch Katie Couric’s debut on CBS News on Monday. I even told Tivo (via the web), to grab it for me. I got home and found that Tivo actually thought it should have recorded Monday’s CBS News instead of Tuesday’s, and instead had decided that Saturday’s news would be equally sufficient (which might be true, but that’s a different story).
I tried again last night, for her second day, and Tivo had actually pulled through. My initial impression is that she has the right stuff for the job, but she hasn’t quite found her niche yet. She appeared awkward and overly perky. But at the same time, she was noticeably trying to moderate her perkiness. It came off as just being uncomfortable.
A toss to Bob Schieffer was way too cordial to make anyone think they were watching the news. It was like she was hosting Today and had just tossed it to Al Roker and wanted to know what he had for breakfast and how his weekend was. When Katie got the toss back from Bob she was again overly polite. Not that polite is bad, but he had just given a report on the president’s admission of secret prisons and she thanked him like he had just donated $10,000 to the Muscular Dystrophy Association. “Thank you very much, Bob!”
They eventually moved on to some clips of her interview with the president. Again, and I don’t know if it was just me, it felt like she was interviewing him for the Today Show rather than CBS News. She came off like a high school cheerleader interviewing the quarterback of the football team.
The interview clips shown were more or less teasers for the terror-filled, scare-you-crazy, we’re-all-going-to-die, laughathon that was the night’s hour-long special report entitled “5 Years Later – How Safe Are We?” I’m unsure if they ever answered that question as I could really only stomach a few minutes of President Bush speaking and Katie babbling.
The one thing I thought was funny was the president saying that he works hard on connecting Iraq and al Qaeda. I’m not sure if he was talking about an explicit connection between the two groups or just being able to connect the two in people’s minds. I lied his way into doing the latter years ago, the problem is, he’s never been able to do the former. I think his actual intent last night was that he wants people to believe that if we leave Iraq al Qaeda will think it’s easier to attack us because we cop out of things. Isn’t the opposite true? If we stay in Iraq (where we don’t belong) we’re opening ourselves up to more attacks becasue no one wants us there?