Oh please. When will these dolts wake up? Who were the people at CBS who came up with the incredibly stupid choice of Couric as an anchor in the first place? It tarnishes their reputation. Of all the women they could have selected to be the first solo evening news anchor, they chose her. Ick.

To reintroduce Katie Couric to the country as a serious yet still accessible evening news anchor on Sept. 5, CBS has embarked on an image campaign worthy of a presidential candidate. The network’s efforts will put her face on the front of every city bus in New York next month as part of a promotion that would cost in excess of $10 million if the national television commercials featuring her were bought by an outsider.

Now – good money after bad (check how how much they are paying her)? I’m disappointed in CBS.

I rarely have strong opinions about newspeople. For me what is most important is the content, not the carrier.

My primal and quite uncharitable feelings for Couric are an exception. There are plenty of other horrible superficial people on television, so I’m not sure why she inspires such revulsion in me. For whatever reasons Couric has always, always, always made my skin crawl and my neck hairs bristle. I have had to acknowlege, and dismiss from my mind, images such as slapping her little face. I don’t have such personal animus toward many people. It is somewhat puzzling. Perhaps I can locate the source of my repulsion and heal it somehow. Perhaps I could watch her as a kind of penance. But no, I don’t think I can, not yet.

Lightweight Couric has little to recommend her. She clearly has very little empathy for others, and she is one of the worst interviewers I have ever seen. She trivializes everything she touches. She seems to deliberately misunderstand almost anything someone says to her. Her questions are trite or whiney or patronizingly hostile, and she doesn’t have the personal charisma to carry off any part of that. It is bad enough when an intelligent and well-informed person is patronizing, but from her it is so much worse.

I cannot tolerate watching important events in our world being narrated by that irritating pneumatic fluffball under almost any conditions I can imagine.

Watching the news is serious business at our house. I guess I’ll be watching Brian Williams on NBC, with a little Charles Gibson on ABC as a change. The Lehrer News Hour is ok (I like Mark Shields), although not as good as it used to be.

I sorely miss Peter Jennings and Dan Rather.