Couric debut helps close gravitas gap
When I was a little girl, one of those tired grade-school jokes went like this:
What’s black and white and red all over?
The answer: a newspaper.
Or, if we were feeling naughty, it was: a nun rolling down a hill.
Katie Couric got all dressed up like a newspaper on Tuesday night to launch her debut as America’s first solo woman news anchor.
In each of her videos posted on her online site that day, as well as in the evening newscast itself, she wore a different combination of black and white. The next day she wore a black suit with white pearls to interview the president.
We’ll have to see if that lasts.
I suspect it’s Couric’s version of lending a note of “gravitas” to her version of the CBS news.
There has been so much fretting and sniping about her lack of that quality – usually defined as a reserved dignity – that earlier this summer she became exasperated.
Her quote showed up on her blog this week. “I’m convinced,” Couric said, “gravitas is Latin for testicles.”
That’s not the definition I’d use. Yet gravitas often seems to be a male attribute, primarily because it’s still mostly men who have been visible wielding it in public life.
I’d argue I’ve seen lots of women display that characteristic over the years. Eleanor Roosevelt probably had it. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan definitely did. Ruth Bader Ginsburg appears to be loaded with it. Condoleezza Rice is getting there.
For me, it boils down to some combination of high IQ along with weight, wrinkles and frown lines. A little silver hair and a resounding voice in a fairly deep register certainly helps.
In the broadcast world, I see variations of it displayed by most of the women on NPR, as well as PBS’ Gwen Ifill and CNN’s Candy Crowley. In fact, when I spotted Crowley on my screen a couple of years ago during the presidential election, my faith in American broadcasting suddenly was restored. She resembled so many American women I know.
Frankly, Crowley doesn’t look like she’d have a prayer of being hired by any local broadcast news affiliate in the country. She wears her hair straight and brown, carries an extra chin and seldom remembers to flash a smile. But she sounds like she really knows what she’s talking about.
Like many Americans my age, I retain a fondness for Walter Cronkite, who delivered so much of the bad news of my childhood right out of our black-and-white Motorola and into my ears.
I perked up a bit on Tuesday night just hearing him introduce Couric’s first broadcast on CBS. Yet I’m also convinced that if we were able to clone Uncle Walter – a man whose voice is more familiar than that of my real uncles – and prop him up on a CBS set with a 1960s script of today’s news, viewers would flee like Viet Cong.
We’re in a new era, and Couric, as well as anybody, has probably nailed its style and tone. She incorporated much of that in her very first broadcast: “Thank you so much for watching,” she said at the end.
She appears warm, funny, casual, accessible and compassionate, and all of that spares you from feeling freaked out that she’s also smart and powerful.
American women have watched that freak-out factor that surrounds us. The shrieking and shrillness directed at Hillary Clinton, for example, make that mean old joke about those all powerful nuns sound pretty tame.
Couric has a style more palatable to the American mainstream, which is why we were more likely to see her as first woman anchor than we are to see Clinton as first woman president.
It’s a pity, really. As difficult as these times are, we could use more women in public life with the gravitas of a Margaret Thatcher or a Golda Meir. But until we’ve run out of firsts for American women, occasions like this remain moments to celebrate.
All the more reason to join that martini toast to Katie.