| Catty
Katie Slams NYT's Errors, Forgets Own Colossal On-Air Goof The TVNewser
blog highlighted Katie Couric’s “Notebook” item from Friday, in which
she mocks the New York Times for making “not one, not two,
but seven errors”
in their remembrance of the late Walter Cronkite last week. TVNewser suggested Couric may
have trying to get “payback” for an anti-Couric piece that the Times’s
Alessandra Stanley wrote four years ago when Couric worked at NBC: Wow. This is good. In her 'Notebook'
on CBSNews.com, Katie Couric takes down New York Times columnist Alessandra Stanley, and
she does it in the cruelest of ways: without mentioning her by name....There is no love
lost between the anchor and the columnist. The most memorable Stanley story on Couric may
be this
2005 take-down of the then-Today show anchor: "At the first sound of her
peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the
lights," Stanley wrote about Couric. Couric sounded pretty high
and mighty in her take-down of the Times: “As we say goodbye to
the dean of TV news, let's all remember as journalists when as we say, 'That's the way it
is,' it really is.”
But a few years ago, Couric utterly embarrassed herself in a Today interview with
Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham, as she quoted extensively from an obvious
parody of Graham’s habit of diary-keeping. Apparently clueless to the fact that she
was quoting a made-up story, Couric confronted Graham: “What, what do you do this
for?!” (Video above; audio available here.) Last Wednesday, Washington
Post Style writer Mark Leibovich wrote a takeoff of Sen. Bob Graham’s eccentric habit
of recording mundane details of his life in color-coded notebooks. It was — let’s
say this in capital letters — A PARODY. But the joke apparently was lost on NBC’s
Katie Couric, who read the notations that morning to the newly declared presidential
candidate on Today....Graham said it was ‘absurd’ and that he hadn’t yet
made the previous day’s entries. An NBC statement said only that ‘Katie followed
up on a story in the Washington Post regarding the Senator’s daily log.’ Yes,
that’s true. Here’s the full
transcript of Couric’s Friday “Notebook,” a 60-second daily commentary
produced for CBSNews.com (video
here):
Walter Cronkite died one
week ago, and while we mourn the loss, it's been wonderful to see such exuberant and
heartfelt tributes all across the country. But I had to smile -- albeit a tad bit
ruefully, and I think he would too -- when I saw the New York Times correcting a piece
that had appeared after his death. The article contained not one, not two, but seven
errors about his life and career. Here’s more detail on
how Couric herself goofed up in her May 7, 2003 interview with Bob Graham on Today
(probably not the tape she used to audition for her CBS Evening News gig), as recounted in
the next day’s CyberAlert: ...Couric ended [her
interview with Florida Senator Bob Graham] with her misreading of the Washington Post:
"And before we go, I know you keep a running log of your every waking activity.
There's an article in the Style section of the Washington Post this morning it says you've
logged 26 years of personal minutiae filling 4,400 two by three inch notebooks,
color-coded by season. An example: 12:17:, this is when you made the announcement: 'Ascend
stage, stumble, regain balance; 12:18: Applause, 'Where the Streets Have No Name,' plays
(U2); 12:19: Clap, wave; 12:20: 'Adjust tie (red, white stripes); 12:21: Double thumbs up;
12:22: Sing along with National Anthem, right hand on heart.' What, what do you do this
for?!" —Rich Noyes is
Research Director at the Media Research Center.
Belying the image of Walter
Cronkite as an journalist without any political motives, while anchor of the CBS Evening
News in 1967 he secretly “pleaded”
with Senator Robert Kennedy to run as an anti-Vietnam war candidate for President and he later acknowledged
that, if offered, he would have accepted the slot as George McGovern's VP in 1972. Frank
Mankiewicz, who worked for both Kennedy and McGovern before serving as President of NPR
from 1977 to 1983, revealed the liberal Democratic political activism of Cronkite, who
passed away on July 17, in a Saturday Washington Post op-ed, “Vice
President Walter Cronkite.” In the late 1960s, just
after he returned from a long visit to Vietnam, Cronkite had sought a meeting with Sen.
Robert Kennedy. I sat in as Kennedy's press secretary. The meeting was understood to be
off the record, and no one else was present. (George McGovern has
recently told audiences about how Cronkite informed him he would have taken the VP job,
but I believe Mankiewicz's information about Cronkite's secret meeting with Kennedy is
new.) Decades later, at a meeting
of a corporate board on which they both served, George McGovern mentioned to Walter
Cronkite that his name had been proposed as the vice presidential nominee at that stage of
the campaign but was rejected because we were certain he would have turned us down. “On
the contrary, George,” the senator told me Cronkite replied, “I'd have accepted
in a minute; anything to help end that dreadful war.” At a later board meeting,
Cronkite told a larger group that he would gladly have accepted the invitation to run with
McGovern. Mankiewicz saw only good
things if the offer had been extended: My suspicion is that if the
ticket had been McGovern-Cronkite instead of McGovern-Eagleton, McGovern might well have
won that 1972 election, or at least have made it close. Had the latter happened, after the
forced resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, McGovern probably would have been
triumphantly renominated -- and elected -- president in 1976, with the most trusted man in
America at his side. Well,
at least that would have saved us from Jimmy Carter.
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