And that's why the President attended Tim Russert's wake
Courtesy of Ramsey Mohsen's tweetblog, I had a look at CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric's "exclusive behind the scenes" YouTube page. (More compelling is Ramsey's new site, just launched. This downtown video he made is, I must say, stunning in its confident style and excellent photographer's eye considering he was, I assume, shooting blind.)
Here's a video that pretty much sums up for me why "TV star" just seems a better job description for folks like this rather than "journalist," with its suggestion of lower pay and poor job security. (Yeah, I know, Katie could lose her job tomorrow, but somehow I don't expect her to do the barista thing
Three things to say about this clip:
YouTube-quality video may not reveal crow's feet, but otherwise is a pretty horrid way for A-list TV talent to present themselves to the public.
Politicians aren't the only ones who now have to be "on" all the time. Criminey, Katie can't even say hi to a nice old lady like John McCain's mom without wondering if the camera is getting a shot of her caboose. Or a boom mic is picking up something she wishes wasn't out there.
In an information age wrapped around an entertainment economy, is there any practical difference anymore between TV stars and politicians? Aren't the best politicians also big-time celebrities everyone wants to see on TV? Not to go too Neil Postman here, but the more you see media celebrities cozying up to elected national officials -- a spectacle that Tim Russert's life did not epitomize so much as his death, with pols and pundits jockeying for TV time to talk about the good times they all spent together -- the more you see of that, the more you think about how insular and risk-averse that culture is (after all, they're all millionaires).
I don't have a deep thought here, but c'mon, "Change"? "Change we can believe in?" Unless "we" includes a big chunk of the Washington elite, the only change that's coming is the kind imposed from outside (9/11, layoffs, subprime crisis, layoffs, four 100-loss seasons, lay ... OK, I'll lay off).
