She has not earned this status.
She has not earned this status.
Y ou have to hand it to Katie Couric.
Unlike disgraced former anchor Dan Rather, who was drummed out of the news business in 2006, she has never faced any serious professional consequences for her shoddy, dishonest brand of journalism.
In fact, despite a thoroughly blemished record, she has managed, late in her career, to reinvent herself as a kind of elder stateswoman of the news media, explaining to her loyal following everything that’s wrong with modern journalism. Leading Democrats, journalists, and pundits are all too eager to do interviews on her podcast or Substack to talk politics and the culture wars.
This is despite the long list of people Couric has mischaracterized, misreported on, and mistreated. Instead of pariah status, she receives expressions of tribute and respect, all while criticizing those she deems unworthy of the title she has wielded unworthily for more than four decades.
One such incident of better-than-thou scolding occurred during a recent interview with former Biden White House mouthpiece Jen Psaki.
Psaki, it turns out, is very cross that there are so many “sycophants” in the White House press corps during the second Trump administration.
“More and more of the questions in there are by sycophants,” Psaki complained, “people who are not asking about news that the American people care about, but they’re asking about, I mean, literally a question has started more than once, ‘Why is Trump in such good shape?’”
She added, “You don’t know that and see that unless you’ve lived there, but that’s a huge, huge problem because it’s becoming more of a Kremlin-esque press corps.”
First, there are still reporters in the White House press corps who ask tough and even antagonistic questions. We just experienced a whole mini-news cycle about President Trump saying to a reporter, “Quiet, piggy.” Psaki recognizes this but still complains that “real” reporters in the press pool are in short supply.
Second, it may be worth noting that although Psaki isn’t completely wrong about the drooling subservience in the pools, she, of all people, hasn’t a leg to stand on. She served under former President Barack Obama, who was asked with a straight face by a member of the White House press corps to name what had “enchanted [him] the most” during his first 100 days in office. Psaki’s next boss, former President Joe Biden, was often asked by members of the then–White House press corps about his ice cream preferences. This was the same group of reporters, by the way, that claims it didn’t notice Biden’s obvious cognitive and physical decline, even though it was clear to everyone else with eyes and ears. Psaki’s complaint, though not entirely wrong, feels a little hollow, given she had no similar gripes for the fawning treatment of either of her former bosses.
As for Couric, she nodded along with Psaki’s assessment, saying of the current White House press shop that “they’ve invited a lot of reporters from very right-wing media outlets. And you’re right . . . there was one example like, ‘Did you ever believe that you would be the peacemaker?’ [It is], I believe, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend.”
She’s referring, of course, to Real America’s Voice chief White House correspondent Brian Glenn.
Seems like a fair dig, but are we forgetting about the time when ABC News reporter Matthew Jaffe married the deputy press secretary for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign immediately following the 2012 GOP primaries, which Jaffe covered? Or that Couric’s former NBC News colleague, Andrea Mitchell, spent years covering the White House as the girlfriend and then eventual spouse of the chairman of the Federal Reserve? Or that Susan Rice’s husband was an ABC News executive producer for some of the years that she served as U.S. ambassador? Or that Jay Carney served as White House press secretary while married to a longtime ABC News reporter? They met in Moscow.
What about the fact that, during the years when Ari Shapiro covered the Obama administration as White House correspondent for NPR, he did so while being the husband of the special assistant to the president of the United States?
For that matter, what right does Couric have to criticize anyone in the current White House press pool? She has repeatedly proven herself a deeply unreliable and untrustworthy figure, yet she still comments on the decline of credible journalism as if she were above reproach.
This is rich coming from the woman who, quite notably, left out parts of an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg because she (and the Supreme Court) evidently didn’t like that the late justice had criticized professional athletes who kneel during the national anthem.
Anthem protesters show “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life,” Ginsburg apparently told Couric. “Which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from.”
Couric struck these comments from her subsequent reporting, explaining in her memoir that she altered the interview for three reasons: to “protect” the late justice’s legacy, because she believed the then-83-year-old justice was too feebleminded to understand what she was saying, and because the head of public affairs for the Supreme Court personally asked for the remarks to be struck from the record.
This is called public relations, by the way, not journalism. Couric faced no professional consequences for this.
But if you think that Ginsburg business is bad, don’t forget the 2016 incident where Couric was caught editing an anti-gun-violence documentary, Under the Gun, to make Second Amendment activists look like uneducated rubes. The documentary, narrated and co-produced by Couric, included an interview with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League. In the final version, Couric seems to stump her guests with a simple question about background checks. However, uncut audio of the interview revealed that the activists were much better prepared than the film shows. Couric and the film’s director, who first tried to dismiss the scandal, eventually admitted to the selective edits. Still, they refused to revise the documentary to include the group’s actual responses.
As this scandal developed, Couric was accused of using similarly misleading edits in a second documentary, this one about obesity in America. That film, Fed Up, included interviews with several health experts, two of whom claimed their interviews were edited to make them look foolish.
“I tried to contact them,” Dr. David Allison of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I asked if I could have an opportunity to screen [Fed Up]. I asked if I could see the film, and never was offered to go see the film before it came out.”
The filmmakers “clearly didn’t reflect an interest in sharing the important scientific dialogue and evidence,” he added.
Couric faced no serious professional backlash from either scandal, which is fairly typical for this industry for a certain type of person.
It’s impossible to have witnessed these developments over the years and not feel ashamed of Couric or embarrassed that she has remained a mainstay in this industry, but contempt can fairly be reserved for those in the news business who treat her, or even Dan Rather, as sources of moral guidance and wisdom for their distrusted and beleaguered profession.