Things from other planets

So I have to say that my knowledge of writers dealing in women's issues is like just a notch above nil. So what I say next, I say with almost no context--I loved Caitlin Falanagan's piece on Katie Couric in this month's Atlantic. Much of the hooblah over Couric's move to the nightly news went right over head, mostly because I can't distinguish one morning show from the other, nor have I ever much understood why one attracts more viewers than the other. I don't know that Flanagan knows either, but man she made a killer case for women who swear by Katie Couric, and even better case for why her move to evenings was ill-concieved and bound for disaster.

The essence:

 

That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail—and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon.

There's a lot of great stuff leading up that sad, tragic point. I know a lot of people hate Flanagan, and possibly with good reason. But man I am a sucker for piece of kick-ass writing.