 THE DECLINE & FALL OF KATIE COURIC
Okay, that's a lie. I know exactly why I want to fuck her. Actually, there are a few reasons. If you're interested, I'll share them with you. I know, that must be pretty shocking to you since I'm normally so shy.
To begin with, Katie looks awfully goddamned good for 50. Most women have no right looking like that at that age. Look, I understand that she might not be your type, but you've got to admit that she should have a lot more mileage on her than she appears to. There are women out there who look like they sprinted face first into a brick wall at 35, and by the time they hit 50, they appear to have actually been exhumed for your big date. All things beings equal, Couric has held together pretty well for a woman of her .... vintage.
Besides, I like older women. There's a lot less bullshit to contend with from them, and I find that greatly helpful. Chances are that I'll never make a living at the two things that I'm actually good at - performing cunnilingus and writing this dopey blog - so I'll be forever condemned to actually working for a living. And after a long day of taking shit from people with the unmitigated fucking cheek to actually be dumber than I am, the last thing I need is more of the nonsense commonly associated with women under, say, 35.
Also, older women are so much better in bed than their younger sisters. This largely has to do with the reality of disappointment. Young women are used to having to their world kiss their tight little asses, so you aren't very likely to impress them. They know as a matter of moral certainty that a guy with a cooler job and a bigger cock is just around the corner to sample their wares and buy them a house. And they aren't likely to learn that life doesn't work that way until they're at least thirty.
But if you find someone who has spent a few years married to a ghoulish scumbag and a lousy lay to boot, it's just ... magical. If you're even hafway attentive and last for longer than four minutes in the sack, such a woman will be devoted to you forever. If you last four hours, she'll build a shrine to you. Take my word for it.
 Zsa Zsa Gabor once said one of the most insightful things I've ever heard come out of a woman's mouth. I can't remember the quote precisely, but it was something along the lines of "There's a decision that every woman has to make when she turns thirty-five, 'What are you going to keep; your body or your face? Because you can't have both.'"
Katie's held both together pretty admirably. Sure, she won't be making a fuck video with Kim Kardashian and Ray J or going to bikini rehab with Lohan anytime soon, but Katie Couric is fifty fucking years old. For Christ's sake, she should get an Olympic medal for keeping her gams and cans in the shape they're in. And as one of her segments on the Today Show clearly demonstrated, Katie isn't shy about letting you peek up her ass If I have to explain to you why this a positive quality in a woman, then you're not someone I want to know.
Last but not least, Katie looks a lot like someone that the great Dr. Reverend and I used to know and that I very much wanted to sexually defile, lo, those many years ago. Now you know my deepest secret: a good many of the celebrities that I want to fuck remind me of someone I know personally and have wanted to dirty up. Besides, finding a woman who can be described as "cute, perky and willing to actively participate in her own sexual degradation" is the great quest of my life. Sadly, this has only served to forever brand me as the Don Quixote of poontang.
If anything, Couric's appeal to me has only grown in the last year. Prior to that, her life was just too easy. Sure, her husband keeled over from a particularly nasty case of asshole cancer, but all that accomplished was that it left her free to date and keep her considerable fortune to herself. On balance, she won - even then.
As the current issue of New York magazine details, the last year has shown our Katie what adversity is really about.
 It wasn't supposed to be like this. Couric was supposed to collect eleventy zillion dollars to helm The CBS Evening News and usher in a cultural revolution in broadcast journalism. To be fair, she did these things, but her revolution was more like the one Mao brought to China between 1966 and 1976 than anyone could have reasonably expected. CBS News - once the gold standard of journalism - is now little more than a kingdom of poverty, professional jealously, despair and almost tangible fear. Without any apparent effort at all, Katie Couric accomplished what focused, polished and practiced monsters like Mao Zedong and Dan Rather could not: she destroyed a once-proud empire all by herself. Hers is the smile that conceals eternal damnation, something that my love life has made me all too familiar with.
What is happening to CBS is just the logical conclusion of where television news has been headed for at least twenty years now. CBS and its president, Les Moonves, are just more honest in admitting it than anyone else is.
Television news isn't all that different than Enjoy Every Sandwich. Both are consumed with superficial sensationalism, and if you learn anything from either, it is only by accident. Both are consumed with freakshows and hold anything that can affect your life in a positive way in utter contempt. There are, to be sure, a few differences. These include;
- To my knowledge, I've never consciously stolen material from the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. I do, however, steal from great writers like Joan and Velociman on a regular basis.
- I have the perfect face for blogging, which is to say that I'm entirely too disfigured for television. Shit, I'm too disfigured for radio. This makes blogging the perfect medium for me.
- I use words like "cocksucker" and "fuckmitten" with a regularity that makes me entirely unsuitable for the anchor chair, but which would qualify me to be the greatest network executive ever.
- I don't allow other people to watch large objects invade my rectum for ratings. I allow it because I'm a really giving guy.
Television news stopped being a learning tool when I was in grade school. At this point, it serves little other purpose than to be something to masturbate to - which is of course why God created Fox News. That being the case, why not bring Katie Couric; with her cute face, big tits and nice legs on board? Look, I enjoy jerking off to Bob Schieffer as much as the next guy. But after a while, it leaves you feeling more soiled than even network news should. And Jenna Jameson is starting to look a little too wrung out even for me. The New York article reads like a 6,000 word manual on how to take a network already reeling from Rathergate and break the wreckage into microscopic pieces that no one will ever again recognize as something that once possessed things like dignity or credibility. It is truly a joyous expose on what happens when you combine ego, stupidity and money. The article is an almost carnally enjoyable for anyone who relishes watching the powerful and pretty get hoisted on their own petards. And I think we all enjoy that, if only just a little. In an effort to protect journalism from the crazed egos and endless stupidity of Hollywood, all three broadcast networks kept their news and entertainment divisions as far away from one another as humanly possible for decades. But that was back when the only competition the networks had were one another. Cable and then the Internet have changed that and the news divisions began to first bleed, then hemmorage, money. That, my teenage friends, is a bleeding that cannot be stanched by trivial concepts like "credibility." The networks responded to declining revenue in a novel way: they brought in the suits from the entertainment divisions to run the show. The entertainment idiots did what entertainment idiots always do, they threw boatloads of money at established talent. Unfortunately, the money that was given to demented yokels like Dan Rather was money that was cut from other areas. These areas included the collection and dissemenation of the fucking news, which is a minor part of that department's mission statement. Ever wonder why you hear so much about Paris Hilton and O.J Simpson? Ask yourself where the entertainment divisions of the networks are located in relation to where Paris lives and you're well on the path to Truth. The results were predictable. Television news became so personality driven that no one with a reading comprehension level higher than your average third-grader took it seriously anymore. It used to be that the success of a news division was decided by the quality of the reporting that it presented. However, in the last thirty years, the six o'clock news has become an even more bizarre extension of Hollywood, with worse hair and a complete absence of dance routines and obnoxious breast implants. Modern journalism is what pornography would be without the beauty, dedication or talent. People like Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric read a fucking teleprompter for a living! Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is a lying motherfucker and craven jackal besides. Those are likely the same people who want you believe in the things like fairy-dust, Santa Claus, Jesus, and the ridiculous proposition that President Bush is compassionate or conservative. Such people should be blasted in the crotch with a firehose at every opportunity, lest they corrupt the children.  This is where the idiot-savant team of Couric and CBS president Les Moonves comes in. That this retard dynamic duo saw themselves as the answer to the other's prayers is one of the most hilarious developments in the much-storied history of television stupidity. And always remember, television executives are the same people that thought you would put your children up for adoption to guarantee that you wouldn't miss an epsode of Supertrain.
It seems that Katie had grown weary of introducing yet another cooking segment and Les decided that he very much wanted his news division to stop losing money. It was assumed that if they joined forces - Katie, a perky, hard-nippled Dick Grayson to Moonves's decidedly more moneyed Bruce Wayne - they would become an unstoppable force of television Wonderfulness and Glee.
This is what their vision looked like;
Less than a year ago, Couric and Moonves seemed like the answers to each other's prayers: She wanted a more serious news profile - just like her arch-rival Diane Sawyer, who last year was vying for the evening-news job at ABC (she lost out to Charlie Gibson). Moonves wanted to attract new audiences to the evening news by making it more like entertainment, envisioning a broadcast that was somewhere in between The Naked News, a British TV show in which beautiful women undress as they read the headlines, and "two boring people behind a desk." Ultimately, the two agreed that the show should be "more personable, more accessible, a little less formal, a little more approachable," says Couric. "That certainly is one of the things they found attractive in hiring me, otherwise they could have had John Roberts do the Evening News." (Roberts, a soap-opera-handsome anchor who was once a candidate to replace Dan Rather, left CBS for CNN in 2006.)
"More personable, more accessible, a little less formal, a little more approachable." Christ, it sounds like they agreed that Couric should be like a stripper who knows what Ehud Olmert's favorite color is - and would be willing to tell you what it is ... during the next dance. And given Moonves's Naked News comment, he envisioned Katie being a lot like that.
 I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but there's a phrase that applies to Katie's desire for "a more serious news profile" on one hand, and Les's vision of bringing The Naked News to CBS on the other. That phrase is "mutually exclusive." You really can't have both. While I frequently imagine getting a handjob from the woman who just told me that my family has just been killed in a horrible plane crash, I'm pretty sure that I'm part of what the business calls a "narrow demographic."
Which brings us right back to Fox News. If a report of, say, a terrorist attack inspires thoughts of me teabagging anyone, that anyone is Juliet Huddy. Fox is geared to facilitate my many perversions in a way that the broadcast networks can never be. Just sayin'.
To say that the Couric / Moonves Project failed is to understate things in a way that even cartoon charcters, everyone who ever tried to compete with Jonny Carson and the former members of Yes would find implausible. Ratings for the CBS Evening News under Katie not only fell below those of Schieffer - who actually died of a heart attack when the House Judiciary Committee passed the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon - they were lower than Dan Rather's were when most of his day was devoted to forging President Bush's National Guard records in Microsoft Word, thereby killing a perfectly good story. Needless to say, that's pretty bad. After all, who wants a handjob from someone losing to Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams? Okay, I do. But I never made pretentions of being a man of wealth and taste, now did I? By the way, did you know that eleventy billion dollars is a literal fuckload of money? That meant that Couric's titanic-sized salary resulted in further cuts to the news department she was supposed to drive into the stratosphere of extra money goodness. The arrival of Katie Couric at CBS was supposed to be the dawn of a day when even the lowliest gaffer was supposed to start shitting nothing but Toblerone. The reality turned out to be something less so. Most critical to Couric's clash with her new colleagues was the nearly insurmountable issue of money. The news division at CBS had been whittled down financially over the years, something Rather often complained about when he was the Evening News anchor. In 1991, the budget for the CBS Evening News was about $65 million a year; by 2000, it was closer to $35 million. Producers and correspondents had learned to cut corners and live on the cheap, scrambling for such simple amenities as food at news events like Columbine or Katrina while NBC showed up with its own catering truck. Now Couric’s widely reported $15 million salary (some in the TV industry say it could be closer to $22 million, though Couric and CBS refute that) was taking up a sizable chunk of the total news budget - plus her segments were expensive to shoot. A regular news segment using a single camera and a correspondent might cost about $3,000 to shoot and cut, but sending Couric to anchor from a remote location - requiring hair, makeup, lighting, and three cameras - could cost as much as $40,000. And it hasn't really helped Katie make friends with the one part of CBS News that actually does make money, the fine folks over at 60 Minutes.
The money issue even followed Couric to 60 Minutes, where she did five segments last season, garnering mixed reviews (too soft on Condoleezza Rice, too hard on John and Elizabeth Edwards). Several veteran correspondents were asked to take considerable pay cuts before and after Couric’s arrival, including, before he died in November 2006, Ed Bradley. Seventy-five-year-old Morley Safer took a 30 percent pay cut (for a reduced workload), and 65-year-old Lesley Stahl was asked to accept a half-a-million-dollar salary decrease during her recent contract negotiations. Wow, That's not merely big - it's ginormous! The people who have being running the top show in its time slot for nearly forty years are being financially punished to pay someone who's getting her ass kicked on a nightly basis. If there's a story here, that's it.
Of course, none of this would matter if Katie Couric could dominate at least one demographic. If nothing else, Rather at least had the Truthers on his team. Couric can't even seem to figure out who actually is watching her. By the first of the year, Couric's ratings seemed to be in free fall. She was having trouble figuring out exactly who her audience was. At Today, she looked into the camera and imagined her average viewer as a 32-year-old lawyer with a toddler who was preparing to prosecute a case that day, or a stay-at-home mom who would "hopefully get some things about raising kids or the environment." On the CBS Evening News, she couldn't see anyone in the camera lens. "I’m not sure," Couric says drily. "My parents. I know they're watching."
"People who are interested in the world and want to stay connected," Couric finally manages with a sigh. "But truth be told, I don't know if those people are in front of the television at 6:30 at night. I hope those that are will find our program compelling. But I don't quite have them in my mind's eye." Obviously, people who masturbate to the evening news aren't watching. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I ... I mean "we" have a hundred gigs of porn on our computers to keep us busy. And when porn grows tiresome, we know that Anderson Cooper is always there for us. He's fucking dreamy! One also suspects that he's a much cheaper date than Katie, with her fabled $2.9 million set demands. All Anderson needs is a gas station restroom or a YMCA somewhere and everybody goes home with a smile on his .... I mean "their" face.  Luckily, when things don't work out well, there's always the sexism card to play. But Katie is smart enough not to play it herself. That, after all, would look bad for someone who is being paid at least $15 million to look cute. Much better that she get her friends to do it for her.
She's also wary of playing the gender card now that things aren’t working out as planned. "I'm not naive. I'm sure there is a percentage of the population that for whatever reason may not feel completely comfortable with a woman in a heretofore male-dominated role," she says. "I think there's a whole confluence of factors that contribute to some people not gravitating toward the program." But her closest friends - a group of women from her UVA and post-college days that includes fund-raiser Kathleen Lobb, Vanity Fair publicist Beth Kseniak, and Larry King Live executive producer Wendy Walker - believe sexism is a big part of the problem and a major source of frustration for Couric. Media criticism - like Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley's piece about Couric’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings - never fails to describe her clothes and appearance, while those details are rarely observed about Gibson or Williams
Uh, I hate to break it to you broads, but something tells me that someone named "Alessandra" isn't likely to be a member of that much-fabled patriarchy that I've been hearing about since I switched from the normal diapers to the adult kind. I'll bet you a dollar that Alessandra Stanley doesn't have a treehouse in her backyard with a "No Gurlz Aloud" sign on it. Just because women don't like each other very much is no reason to drag people with penises into it.
Couric's response has been to tone down her wardrobe. "I try to give them as little to talk about as possible, without becoming Pat on Saturday Night Live," she says. But even conservative pantsuits can't quell the interest in Couric beyond her performance on the news. The tabloid press has been particularly harsh in its analysis of her romantic relationships. Larry King's marriage to a woman a quarter of a century his junior barely registers as surprising, but when Couric started dating a preppy 33-year-old entrepreneur and amateur triathlete named Brooks Perlin, the Post gleefully dubbed her a "cougar" for "devouring" a younger man. "It's all so stupid," says Couric, agitated. "The people who come up with this garbage and the people who market in pettiness … Do people enjoy this? Is this how they get their kicks?"
Why, yes, Katie, yes it is. Welcome to the world of media sensaltionalism. Enjoy your stay. Say hi to JonBenet while you're here.
Katie is being far too petty about the reporting of her relationship, and I'm over-reacting to that pettiness. Is it because of jealousy? Of fucking course it is! I'll be the first to admit it, I want a cute cougar of my own to devour me. And I'll shithammer everyone in sight - including Katie - until I get one, godfuckit. Sexism, gossip and rainy days all suck, but my penis doesn't give a shit. It has real priorities. God help any of you who get in my Mighty Putz's way. I didn't give it the pet name of "Alessandra Stanely" just to be a fucking cutey-pie.
Besides, the most sexist things that have been said about Katie Couric since she took over the CBS Evening News have all been said in this essay, so fuck her yenta buddies.
Les Moonves made a fundamental mistake and it has blown up in his face to the tune of about $75 million over five years. He bet that he could do in news what he did in entertainment, get a perky piece of ass to drive up ratings.
 That didn't work, and it didn't for one fundamental reason: women prefer getting their news from someone they either see as a potential father or sex partner. But may Jesus save anyone who tries to let boys have a little fun, too, because your'e wife sure as shit won't. Women will rip that Teleprompter-reading tart to fucking pieces. You should note that something like 90% of the hit articles on Katie have been written by women.
Or maybe I'm the only one who really needs to be devoured by a cougar. Who can say?
Not that it really matters. Les Moonves still gets to home every night and fuck Julie Chen from the CBS Early Show and lavish her with gifts paid for with all of that groovy CSI: Miami and Everybody Loves Raymond money. What the fuck does he care what happens to the network's loss-leader?
And that's why Les Moonves is the Happiest Man Alive and I'm a miserable bastard.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Dirty Laundry By: Don Henley From: I Can't Stand Stand Still
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