In an unfortunate recent interview, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather offered his take on why CBS news has taken a plunge in the ratings, opining that, “(T)he mistake was to try to bring the Today ethos to the evening news and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience.”
No mention of Charles Gibson’s past on Good Morning America and of course Rather stipulates that he has the highest regard for Katie Couric. Uh huh. As columnist Ann Althouse pointedly asks,
1. Is Rather insinuating that having a female newscaster is part of the process of “tarting up” the news? I know he doesn’t precisely make that connection, but, to me, it’s just glaring that the word “tart” means prostitute.
2. Why on earth does it matter what time the news is on? If something is wrong for the evening news, why isn’t it just as wrong for the morning news? I think what is unstated is that only women are watching those morning shows, so the standards are lower.
It is worth remembering that when Couric was hired, there was all this hoopla about her credentials and America being ready for a woman news anchor. And now CBS’ Les Moonves says that numbers show that just a few months later we’re not? Oh and by the way, let’s also not forget that CBS’s numbers were already in the toilet when Couric took over the evening news slot.
We will probably never know if Katie Couric is a creditable news anchor because she is attempting to survive in an atmosphere where the white male powers that be in newsrooms everywhere consistently sensationalize the news, asking us to believe that Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton are just as important as the Iraq war and global warming. As Jon Stewart recently pointed out on The Daily Show, CNN cut away from a story about General Peter Pace’s resignation to go live to the courtroom where Ms. Hilton was getting in a car, they even went so far as to call in an expert, Tommy Chong (as in Cheech and..) to comment on the case. Not a shining example of having your priorities straight.
So are the news gatekeepers pushing tartiness? A recent AP piece proclaimed “Porn is becoming the ideal of what’s sexy,” explaining, “(T)he message is clear: In today’s world, sex doesn’t just sell. The pervasiveness of porn has made sexiness — from subtle to raunchy — a much-sought-after attribute online, at school and even at work.” If that isn’t blatant enough, try the new “Anchorwoman” reality show that will, as Jenn Pozner explains on the WIMN’s Voices Blog, “feature a busty blonde bikini model and former WWE wrestler as an on-air anchor of KYTX Channel 19, a local CBS affiliate in Tyler, Texas.” Not much room for doubt there.
Nonetheless, there is a case to be made that despite the language used, the key point is that the dumbed down tripe that passes as news these days is unacceptable. But it is also true that media sexism is alive and well and tartifiction, as Mr. Rather so (dis)gracefully put it, is hardly the only form of media misogyny which has many guises including ridicule, exclusion, discounting, discrimination, etc. Not only is that damaging to women but it creates a deliberately distorted view of the world that harms us all. And that is a crucial issue and to lose sight of it in the discussion of ‘yes, but what he really meant to say . . .’ only perpetuates the misogyny.