The Great Unwatched

Katie Couric, according to the fawning Howard Kurtz, is feeling liberated.

That’s good, what with all the oppression generally suffered by talking heads who make $15 million a year. Imagine the brutality of an existence where one—by reading words into a camera—is rewarded with a salary that eclipses the gross domestic product of Afghanistan. Now imagine being forced to read those words into that camera from inside a posh New York studio. The horror.

But brave Katie will not be imprisoned. She has slipped the pearly bonds of Manhattan and is traversing the blasted sod of this once great nation. Visiting exotic locales such as Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey, she appears to be on some sort of unsolicited listening tour. Or, as she so eloquently puts it, touring “this great unwashed middle of the country”.

One wonders, does the perky anchorette realize that phrase is what the English baron and professional word-mangler Edward Bulwer-Lytton used to describe the undesirable, presumably poor, masses?

One further wonders, does the winsome news reader realize the definition of ‘middle’? Geographic evidence would seem to exclude Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick from the middle of anything except, possibly, the Western hemisphere.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that this ratings-poor pixie is a Reporter.

It’s great for me to get out of the chair and into the world. I started out as a reporter, and I still enjoy reporting.

See?

She reports. That’s what she does. For her job. And sometimes that means getting out of the chair, being chauffeured to middle-ish regions of the hinterlands (where lurk Neanderthals), and getting her Manolos dirty. And she’s okay with that. That’s the job. Plus, she has a smart pair of Ferragamos as a backup (which are so much more wearable than those dreadful Louis Vuittons).

In fact, she’s more than okay with that. It just so happens that Katie has—as do we all—an executive producer. And according to her executive producer:

She really looks for opportunities to feel the earth and touch people.

Oh so invigorating, it is, the tactile thrill that comes from squinting one’s eyes and tentatively extending a probing finger toward something icky. Followed by the screaming and the running in place. Eeeeee! I just touched a worm!

So we—the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, and our executive producers—say this: come, Ms. Couric; feel our earth, touch our people. Renew your noble soul. Then climb back into your cashmere prison, gaze into the camera that loves you and continue to recite that which the TelePrompTer deems appropriate for proletariat consumption. Because that, the calming reassurance of your televised sincerity and your on-air colonoscopies are exactly what this troubled nation so desperately needs.

Pity, then, for us and your ratings, that we fetid, mouth-breathing derelicts in flyover country are simply too stupid to watch.