CNN’s Anderson Cooper To Be Traded For CBS’s Katie Couric?

If America can have our first black American president, why can’t we also have our first gay anchor during an evening news broadcast at a major TV network? 

The savvy and much admired Anderson Cooper from CNN is rumored to become the face of CBS News.  Cooper has proved his journalistic credentials over the years at CNN, and will bring a new and rejuvenating energy with him to CBS. 

Katie Couric never had the needed ‘heft’ and creditably for the job as anchor.  She will do much better in an interview format, which she has proved to be highly skilled.

I can only hope these rumors prove to be true.  And soon.

Technorati Tags: KatieCouric, AndersonCooper, CBS, Gay, CNN, Media, Journalism

 

Chris Matthews, Great American and Pundit, Cover Story In New York Times Magazine

I love Chris Matthews and his style of political punditry on his MSNBC show “Hardball”.  But more importantly I respect where he came from, and the bedrock notions about America and politics that he is not embarrassed to stand by and affirm.  He is, I believe, one of the most sincere faces on any political show today.  After harsh rhetoric and demonzing from each political party, it is Chris Matthews who can cut through to the core issues and speak to the broad middle of America.  The place he grew up in.

This week Chris Mattews is the cover story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. 

A few excerpts.

There is a level of ubiquity about Chris Matthews today that can be exhausting, occasionally edifying and, for better or worse, central to what has become a very loud national conversation about politics. His soothing-like-a-blender voice feels unnervingly constant in a presidential cam-paign that has drawn big interest, ratings and voter turnout. He gets in trouble sometimes and has to apologize — as he did after suggesting that Hillary Clinton owed her election to the Senate to the fact that her husband “messed around.” He is also something of a YouTube sensation: see Chris getting challenged to a duel by the former Georgia governor, Zell Miller; describing the “thrill going up my leg” after an Obama speech; dancing with (and accidentally groping) Ellen DeGeneres on her show; shouting down the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin; ogling CNBC’s Erin Burnett. And he has provided a running bounty of material for Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, which has devoted an entire section of its Web site (“The Matthews Monitor”) to cataloging Matthews’s alleged offenses, especially against Hillary Clinton and women generally.

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Yet for as basic as he has become to the political and media furniture, Matthews is anything but secure. He is of the moment, but, at 62, also something of a throwback — to an era of politics set in the ethnic Democratic wards of the ’60s and the O’Neill-Reagan battles of the ’80s. And he is a product of an aging era of cable news, the late-’90s, when “Hardball” started and Matthews made his name as a battering critic of Bill Clinton during the Monica saga.
Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it. Mat-thews’s bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews’s MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.

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“I like the fact that people don’t think of me as famous, but that they know me,” Matthews said. “They come up to me and say, ‘Chris, what do you think?’ There’s no aura. It’s a different kind of celebrity. People assume they have a right to talk to me. They want to know my take.”

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Katie Couric Might Leave CBS Anchor Role In Weeks

Having never thought that Katie Couric was a good fit as the anchor for the CBS Evening News, I was not surprised to read the news today of a possible decision soon to replace her as anchor.  This comes just days after it was announced that finally she would get her own chance to moderate a presidential debate on CBS April 27th from North Carolina.  I had wondered when she would get a chance to do what every other anchor had done this campaign season.

The news today about her possible exit as anchor comes after awful ratings for the once proud CBS news division.  To be fair to Couric, the anchor role  was not the best way to showcase her better skills as an interviewer.  But I still think the return of the anchor chair to a more solid type of reporter is a great idea for CBS.

As The New York Times reports today there is plenty of speculation about her future.

However, rumors from CBS News and reported in the news media may have, inadvertently or not, done what the meeting failed to do: ensured Ms. Couric’s early departure.

Though some people close to Ms. Couric, as well as some professional associates, said Thursday they believed that it was now likely she would not remain as anchor through the election, and might even leave in the next few weeks, that point was adamantly denied by the senior executives closest to the decision.

“Katie is absolutely going to continue as anchor until the inauguration and very possibly beyond that,” one said.

The executives involved in the situation said that no discussions of Ms. Couric’s future had taken place since the February meeting. Yet the news that she and CBS were even considering an end to the first effort to have a woman as the primary anchor of a network news division surfaced in press reports in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere on Thursday, creating a situation that appeared to leave Ms. Couric vulnerable.

“She’s not a definite lame duck,” a senior executive who has been close to the situation said. “Nothing is decided.”

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