How will the Vieira era be different from the Couric era? Meredith has only been on the Today show for one morning, but so far, the answer is: steamier. We should remember–and a bio reel prepared by Today took pains to remind us–that she’s a serious newswoman, having 60 Minutes on her resume alongside The View and Who Wants to be a
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School’s in by now in most of the country, and starting Sunday
night, it’s back in for HBO’s The Wire. When it debuted in 2002, it was
described, for lack of a better term, as a cop show. And it was, as far
as that went: the first season described a single investigation into a
Baltimore drug ring, beginning to end, going deeply into the
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Start pointing fingers over a national disaster and somebody’s going to get ticked off. The 9/11 Commission learned that first, and now ABC has, having made a miniseries based on the commission’s report. Several former members of the Clinton administration have attacked the miniseries as a partisan hit job. In particular, former
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Thursday night, Fox debuts two bad sitcoms that together pose a good question: What makes men more miserable–love, or the lack of it?
Taking the shows in reverse order, Happy Hour (8:30 p.m. E.T.) unintentionally makes both singlehood and couplehood into their own special kind of hell. Larry (Lex Medlin), a cocky, martini-mixing
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"All summer long," Couric, says, "people have been asking me, how will you sign off at the end of your broadcast? I’ve racked my brain, and, so far, nothing has felt right." Couric then introduces a montage of famous anchor sign-offs–"Courage," "Good night and good luck," "Stay classy, San Diego"–and concludes that she’s opening up her
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Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes introducing a segment on The PBS NewsHour. I hear the original idea–to have it blaring from a boombox, held aloft by Walter Cronkite–was rejected.
"Expressing your opinion is very American," announces Couric, earnestly introducing tonight’s freeSpeech segment and sounding like she’s introducing a student-council-election-speeches assembly. Morgan Spurlock gives a decently funny piece on how the public discourse focuses on the extremes of ideology, ignoring the folks in the middle.
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"The folks at Chevron felt like they won the lottery!" Thus Couric introduces a segment on the reported new Gulf of Mexico oil find. I know Couric is a neighborly type, and that’s part of her appeal, but… "the folks"? I can’t wait to hear what’s up with "those cutups over at the Dept. of Homeland Security" or "those Halliburton dudes."
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First advertiser: Vytorin anti-cholesterol medication. But there’s also one of those Dr. Scholl’s "Are you gellin’?" commercials, which probably qualifies as edgy for the evening news.
Couric announces that she’lll have an exclusive interview with President Bush tomorrow, and manages not to gloat. She then spends a few seconds on the obligatory Steve Irwin item, but at least does not lead with the item, as NBC did yesterday. Who’s got gravitas now, punk?
The news has co-operated tonight by not overshadowing Couric with any important breaking events, allowing all us media analysts to focus on the truly substantive matter of what she’s wearing. (Eye-grabbing but not-too-girly bright-white jacket.) Instead, the broadcast opens with a packaged piece by Lara Logan on the Taliban, followed by
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"I’m very happy to be with you tonight." Couric sounds a bit needy here. Diane Sawyer would be making us feel like we were damn lucky she deigned to join us.
A whole minute into her broadcast, Couric’s show looks very much in the stand-up-and-stride-to-the-desk mold of modern evening news. But I’m interested to see the "freeSpeech"
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As we sit nervously awaiting The Day That Changed Everything, it’s worth wondering if the most interesting part of The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric will be the parts when Couric is not on-screen. The intriguing details that have leaked out, for instance, have to do with things like opinion segments–reportedly including Rush
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