As Ava and C.I. have pointed out, Bash the Bitch is a national pastime. And apparently fun for the whole family. The way it works is that a woman gets zoomed in on while males are ignored. Sensing blood in the water, the Water Cooler Set, online and off, zoom in for the easy kill they imagine. They ignore what men are doing. They ignore what anyone's doing. In fact, they frequently ignore what the woman's doing. They just bash, bash, bash.
Elisabeth Bumiller was a popular target a few years back. "Knee pads" and Bumiller seemed to co-exist in every sentence. Though Bumiller was hardly the only offender, name a male reporter (not columnist) who got the same treatment. (Common Ills members can name Todd S. Purdum and note that the "smelly jock strap" joke was created to underscore how a man gets off with bad reporting but a woman's crucified for it.) It's not a secret, for instance, that David E. Sanger (New York Times) and Ann Coulter are buddy-buddy. David Sanger has certainly offered some howlers (including this week on Washington Weak, Ava and C.I. note), but there was no equivalent among the set for what they did to Bumiller. Or Jodi Wilgoren.
At one point, Adam Nagourney was the focus of some ire. That faded long before he learned to suck up to bloggers in print.
Judith Miller, say people who never read The New York Times, got the country into an illegal war. Judith Miller was far from alone. And it's not like she wrote her stories, edited her stories, selected what ran on the front page, printed the papers and then drove house to house delivering them. But when people think about the illegal war, they think Judith Miller.
Now Michael Gordon also sold the illegal war as a reporter at the same paper. (In fact, many did, but let's focus on Gordo.) Gordo's made this year and last about attempting to sell the readers on an illegal war with Iran. So he's a two-time offender. He even co-wrote stories on Iraq with Judith Miller.
But Gordo's name doesn't come up in the discussions of the bad Iraq coverage very often.
If the Water Cooler Set, online and off, were truly concerned about the quality of reporting, it's very doubtful that the demonized set would always be women. But that is how it goes. Juan Williams is just as bad as Cokie Roberts but he's called out far less, to switch to NPR. Ted Koppel, whose entire career was built around selling what the State Department wanted, even got odes online -- from alleged lefties -- when he stepped away from Nightline. Jim Lehren has gone on and on for years shoveling sh*t to PBS viewers and yet he's not a national joke.
Now we don't care if women get called out, provided it's done evenly. If women make themselves a joke, laugh it up. But we do care that the easy yucks avoid the men. We do care that a double standard is being practiced.
You saw that with the 'coverage' of Katie Couric's trip to Iraq last week for The CBS Evening News. Before she even got there, our 'critics' were dishing in a manner Louella and Hedda could only once dream about. (And Louella had the backing of William Randolph Hearst!) Last Sunday, Ava and C.I. wrote, "If Couric (whom we know and like) blows it, does a lousy job, in Iraq, by all means pile on."
Well people certainly piled on. Couric interviewed a general who lies repeatedly (read the transcript of any of his briefings -- usually one or two reporters will force him into admitting he has no proof or whatever claim he's making, one or two out of a huge number of reporters present for the briefing). Some pointed out that Couric didn't question him sufficiently. That is a valid criticism. It would be equally valid to point it out when many male anchors or reporters have done the same. However, that hasn't really happened, has it?
If that was valid, the bulk was nothing but a rush to burn a woman at the stake. People didn't feel compelled to offer facts. Or to even tie their bashing into reality. Couric interviewed Syrian president Bashar Assad and that somehow escaped the 'critics.' Facts were so unimportant to the pile on that the Online Predator (with two arrests to his name -- at least two) could, as C.I. noted, hop on the dog pile by writing, "CBS is owned by General Electric. GE is working hard to get favorable trading status with any number of foreign trading partners. The U.S. trade representative is working hard on GE's behalf." CBS is not owned by GE (it's owned by Viacom). NBC is owned by GE. It says a great deal about the reflexive impulse to take part in Bash the Bitch that neither Truthdig nor Common Dreams caught that very obvious error (and a 'point' the Predator built his 'critique' on) before deciding to post the nonsense.
Is Couric worse than Brian Williams and/or Charlie Gibson? Gibson is infamous for falling asleep on camera and, when a guest touches on a subject that's 'controversial,' declaring that the feed has been lost when it has not (one example of that is an interview for Good Morning America with Gore Vidal). Williams is famous for loving Rush Limbaugh, writing letters as a little boy to his hero Richard Nixon and bragging to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show that he favors censorship.
So it's really amazing that Couric continues to be the focus until you grasp that the real 'crime' she's committed is being born a woman. That's why even people with TV news experience, too old to have bright futures anymore, post nasty little crap about her online while never saying a word about Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson.
Media Matters critiqued Couric last week. We haven't read it all but Media Matters generally treats everyone the same. They'll go to town on a woman as quickly as they will on a man. It's a real shame that others can't say the same. Take CounterSpin -- by the media watchdog FAIR --which should have apologized for the nonsense of trying to turn ratings into a media critique. When an organization named "FAIR" is playing double-standards with women, it's really not a surprise that everyone's seeing a green light to go to town on Couric.
It's real cute the way FAIR used the Tyndall Report to slam Couric but when the weekly report found good news in Couric's broadcasts compared to the other two network's, they didn't feel the need to use that report to criticize ABC or NBC's nightly newscasts.
Couric's a "first." As Ava and C.I. pointed out in 2005, "sometimes a first can be a worst." That may or may not be the case with Couric. To determine that, we'd have to see serious critiques that took all three anchors of the network's news to task equally. But what is known is that Couric is the first woman to anchor (not co-anchor) the evening news. And if this is how the 'left' is going to respond to it, we won't hold our breaths waiting for the next woman.
It's not just men playing Bash the Bitch. And one of the loudest critics last week, calling Couric a phony and fake, but offering little proof of either, was of course a woman who came to fame and money via a marriage to a now out gay man. A man she knew was gay before they married.
She wants to rule that topic off-limits and hits the roof when her ex-husband talks about the marriage. Suddenly, she's a woman and she's a mother and these things just shouldn't be discussed and are no one's business. If that's her attitude, the question might be why she doesn't apply the same attitude to her very personal critiques of Couric?
This isn't an issue of "Katie Couric is above criticism!" This is an issue of fairness. If Media Matters can treat men and women equally in their criticism, if they can call out either based on what they observe, it's a real shame that so many others can't do the same. But Media Matters proves that it can be done.
While everyone treated Katie Couric like a pinata last week, they somehow missed the fact that while she spent the week in the Middle East, many daily papers stopped reporting from Iraq. The Los Angeles Times, to cite only one example, usually has a piece filed by three p.m. EST each Monday through Friday. A polished version appears the next day in print. For some unknown reason, the paper had a real problem filing reports from Iraq last week. When seven U.S. service members were announced dead Friday morning, not only did they not have an article up on that by Friday evening, they didn't have one in the print edition of the paper Saturday or today. Or take The New York Times which managed to cover a mid-week announcement of eight announced deaths of US service members by halving the total and reporting on four.
Katie Couric was the biggest mainstream media problem on Iraq last week?
The day the eight deaths were announced, Today used their 'hard news' period (the first half-hour) to provide segments on a missing millionaire, on whether or not Larry Craig was stepping down from the Senate, on an 'analyst' playing 'impartial' while going to town on Hillary Clinton (and if you love Bill Clinton, you tend to love Hillary -- they are a package, a team, there is no huge split between Bill Clinton supporters and Hillary Clinton supporters) and much more. After fifteen minutes or so, it was finally time for the news reader to provide headlines. What did she lead with? Barbie's Dream House. And when it was finally time to briefly mention the number of US service members announced dead that morning, the news reader got it wrong and reduced the number.
Katie Couric was the biggest mainstream media problem on Iraq last week?
Between Monday and Friday last week, 17 deaths of US service members were announced. Did that register in whatever outlet you utilize? Did it even rate a mention?
The White House spin is that the escalation has worked. It appears to us that a number of outlets wanted to avoid risking the ire of the White House so they avoided filing the usual number of reports from Iraq that they would in even a slow news week.
But most people will never know that happened because most were too busy getting giddy over another round of Bash the Bitch. Who's really served by that?
It's a question worth asking before the game is (again) taught to the next generation.