The Meltdown of Katie Couric and the Network News....

From Jane Genova:


Well, it's out. Here's that 6,000 word article by Joe Hagan in NEW YORK Magazine that cites the Katie Couric "slap" incident. What the article clearly demonstrates is that Katie is jinxed, at least in the media, and probably by the media. For example, of that 6,000 words, only about 140 of them recount the time during the June TB story, news editor Jerry Cipriano used the word "sputum" in his copy for Katie. Katie, Hagan reports, "began slapping him [Cipriano] 'over and over and over again' on the arm, according to a source familiar with the scene." Yet last night the web, including the popular Drudge Report, treated this as high buzz.

Amazing that 140-something words would be a key developing story, particularly with so much else happening on planet earth. And, that's exactly it: The jinx. The rest of the article, though, doesn't do Katie any service either. You can't help but shake your head as you read it and exclaim: That lady is, yeah, under a dark spell.

For example, throughout the piece, Hagan captures Katie as vacillating from denial to subterfuge about everything from how she got into this situation to how it's going to why it's going that way to how she really does feel about it.

Case in point: From the article, it seems that Katie perceives the backstage backbiting and leaking as something the old guard at CBS shouldn't be doing and should be above even considering. On this Katie sounds downright shoolgirlish. She's been in the work world for years. Moreover, she's been in the ultra cut-throat world of TV. In addition, that world has become a dying medium and in such environments, expect people to be on their very worst behavior. Katie would have come across as more credible and less stupid if she said, "Of course in TV you expect undercutting, blaming, even sabotage. But this turned out, at least as I saw it, as over-the-top."

But maybe that's it: Maybe Katie is stupid. Or maybe that's part of the jinx: It rendered her stupid. Any reasonably bright person would have to know that this interview would be over-the-top harsh. Or, put another way, any person not jinxed would have laughed at Hagan for even asking as she said NO.