Katie "Goes There"

Katie Couric's new book reveals her to be a heartless monster. When she first started at the Today Show, I felt like she was the happy, witty, friendly High School girl you want to be friends with. If you are watching Apple's "The Morning Show", you get a little taste of the chaos and backstabbing that went on on the Today Show.  

Katie Couric (New York Post piece) is the worst kind of hypocrite. She uses this book to posit herself as some kind of feminist trailblazer with a substantive legacy in news, when in truth she’s a vindictive backstabber who hides behind that irritating smile, who blames others for her downward trajectory — from “Today” to her disastrous short tenure at “CBS Evening News” to a poorly-executed talk show to Yahoo! to Instagram Stories or whatever she’s doing now. 

It all begs the question: Why did she write this book? Is it a money grab? Couric clearly wants to cement her own legacy, but she doesn’t get how terribly she comes across. There is zero self-awareness here, personally or professionally. She embraces her instant fame without examining its dangers or falsities. “In virtually every room I entered . . . they were all atwitter just to meet me.” On her supportive first husband Jay’s minor success as an on-air legal analyst, Couric says she found herself silently admonishing him to “stay in your lane.”

She is jealous of Diane Sawyer, who is “everything I wasn’t — tall, blonde, with a creamy complexion . . . her voice ‘full of money,’” her resumé top-flight, Couric now a widow with Sawyer “in a high-wattage marriage,” comportment always “sleek and sophisticated.” 

Yet when Sawyer lands an exclusive Couric wanted — not a head of state or A-list star but a 57-year-old woman who had just given birth — Couric is incensed. “I wonder who she had to blow to get that,” Couric says to her colleagues. That’s the kind of humor all the boys love. Cool Girl.

Couric iced out Ashleigh Banfield, threatened by her designation as an “up-and-comer”; she mocked Martha Stewart at a high-profile gala event for being too perfect and so good at everything — which tells you where Couric’s Achilles’ heel is. Every new female hire, Couric writes, stoked her “All About Eve” obsession.

 Katie Couric is that relic: The guy’s-gal, the woman who can’t really be friends with other women because they’re all just jealous and out to get her. No wonder she defends Matt Lauer. No wonder she minimizes the horrific report of a rape he allegedly committed in his office, one that left the woman unconscious, an ambulance called to 30 Rock and the woman taken to the hospital. 

In Couric’s version, Lauer “pulled down the producer’s pants, bent her over a chair and had sex with her. Then she passed out.” As will happen — am I right? The only breaking news here is that Matt Lauer is still embraced in the Hamptons by all the male media bigwigs who matter.

“Even though I had read about all the awful things Matt had done, I was worried about him,” Couric writes. She replicates text exchanges in which she tells Lauer “I am crushed” — for him! “I love you and care about you deeply,” she texts him. “I am here.” In the book, Couric tries to explain why she had dinner at Jeffrey Epstein's.

That she did this and felt this way is one thing. Actually, she still kind of feels this way, because she writes of how deeply she misses him. But why put it down in black and white, in the pages of your memoir, four years into #MeToo? I can only come up with one explanation: Katie Couric just isn’t that bright.

Truly, her memoir shows a distinct lack of intellectual heft or critical or original thinking. Couric takes her life lessons from “Sex and the City.” Her heroine is Audrey Hepburn — lovely person, but you’d think a high-profile journalist might go deeper. The woman made famous for asking Sarah Palin what newspapers she reads shares nothing here of her own reading or deep-dive investigative journalism. The major stories she covered — the first Gulf War, Columbine, Sept. 11 — exist here as mere backdrops to whatever was going on in her personal life. Her tone is breezy and gossipy, the tone and tenor off. 

Cronkite’s “A Reporter’s Life,” this is not. 

Instead, Katie Couric has come to disparage modern feminism and many of our recent, hard-won gains. All these women now crying rape or assault or harassment — really, she asks, what were these successful, wealthy, Ivy League educated and often married men to do?

Men who, back in the archaic 1990s, Couric writes, “suddenly found themselves surrounded by exceptional young women seeking mentors, looking to impress and rise through the ranks and even compete with their male counterparts” and so “couldn’t help themselves from coming on to their new colleagues.” It’s not like there wasn’t a raging presidential sex scandal that fueled debate over sexual abuses in the workplace or anything. Couric writes that so many of these young women had only themselves to blame. “Some leveraged the situation,” she writes, “accommodating a supervisor’s desires for the sake of their careers.”

This is ugly, misogynistic stuff. Women outnumber men as consumers and readers of books by a significant margin. So I say to my fellow women something I never thought I ever would: Don’t buy this book. The juicy stuff is already out there. Don’t put money in Katie Couric’s pocket. Don’t legitimize this disgusting pile-on of victims, this cynical and gross defense of abusers.