In the past, I have written a few critical words about the “Today” show, which I think is a mushy stew of children, celebrities, book pushers and scare stories about health fears. It reflects the advertising driven falsehoods of the General Electric Company which is itself a creation of the military-industrial-entertainment rulers called “We the People”.

“Cutie” Couric (no disrespect intended) has done an outstanding job, nonetheless, keeping her bobbing hair-do above water for the past 15 years. She has co-anchored with two of the least humorous men in television, Bryant Gumbel and Matt Lauer. They both seemed to be threatened by her cantankerous wit and cerebral hard drive. She was there on the morning of September 11, 2001 calmly explaining the tragedy as it unfolded. She has interviewed world leaders from Castro to Arafat. She is a world traveller, unlike our current chief executive. She underwent a televised colonoscopy, to save lives, after her husband died from cancer. She is not a lightweight, or a bimbo, or chick who is there to make a man look good. She stands on her own as an aggressive reporter who also can smile and cry and still be a “cutie”. Can you picture Bill O’Reilly getting his ass probed on TV? Couric is a risk taker in a very cautious and careful arena.

Her move to CBS to anchor The Evening News has been criticized because she lacks something called “gravitas” or importance. Men are big on this word gravitas because many of those who possess it have gained it through the buddy system or by being 6’4, 250 pound Notre Dame line-backers who later went into sports journalism. They have lantern jaws, broad shoulders, steely blue eyes, deep voices, horizontally etched foreheads and wear dark blue flannel suits and red and white rep ties. They speak gravely of the market,who is in the dugout and they think Chris Matthews is next to Albert Einstein intellectually. Men with gravitas are annoyed that Cutie Couric could get to the top of the news mountain merely by working hard and thinking smart. They wish that the old rules were still in place, that only white Christian males with a wife and three kids could anchor the national news.

Our image of a newscaster is cast in stone and that rock is Walter Cronkite. But Cronkite left the scene 20 years ago, and there are even some who think that Donald Sutherland (who has no news experience) possesses more gravitas than Couric and should replace Dan Rather. We are addicted to who looks important and sounds official and acts it… and so we have a Donnie Rumsfeld and Dickey Cheney telling us lies when the content of their words is empty. Couric may impersonate a flighty dingbat at times, but she is sharp and witty and knows her shit.

Cutie is cute, and others have said that she will not “age well” and that she comes from the entertainment side of the aisle and doesn’t deserve to be top dog. But it isn’t Couric who must age well: it’s the news, and American news that is getting senile with its soft and narcissistic “red state” stories and inability to shake up our consciousness. There is a world out there, from Antartica to the Artic and from San Luis Obispo to Samarkand. But our 6:30 pm Nightly News is a 20 minute quick cast of domestic idiocy and one second sound bites.

Maybe Couric will make a better newscaster because she knows how stupid the news has become and may work to improve it.