Katie Couric isn’t judgmental of Palin; Rachel Maddow out & proud

In the January issue of Vogue (the one with Anne Hathaway on the cover), CBS’s Katie Couric, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Campbell Brown are interviewed “exclusively” right after the election. All of the interviews are revelatory – from reading the Couric interview, I really get a sense that Couric was quietly rooting for Hillary Clinton in the primaries; in the Maddow article, I get a sense of how comfortable Maddow is with being an “out,” proud and non-chalant gay woman; from the Campbell Brown article, I was surprised to find out she grew up in a very Democratic Party-oriented family, yet somehow ended up converting to Judaism to marry a Republican Jew. And she’s pregnant, which I didn’t know. I watch Keith Olberman at 8 p.m., not Campbell.

Katie Couric talked extensively about how she felt like she came into her own throughout the 2008 election cycle, the finale of which was her up-until-three-a.m. election night live coverage. She also gets retrospective and introspective about Hillary Clinton, and how Sen. Clinton’s journey reflected her own.

Any discussion of Katie Couric raises the specter of sexism, not just for our apparent resistance to seeing a lone woman read the evening news and our fixation on female appearance but, more tellingly, because of the complicated relationship we have with high-profile women. Commenting on the Couric phenomenon, columnist Liz Smith cites “Elizabeth Taylor’s idea about the yo-yo theory of success. When you’re down, they pull you up; when you’re up, they pull you down.”

Indeed, Couric’s career trajectory as CBS anchor closely resembles Hillary Clinton’s as presidential candidate: A distinct Schadenfreude greeted Couric’s tumble from the ratings grace she enjoyed at NBC (“Alas, Poor Couric: But Pity Her Not” was the title of a New York magazine cover story), as if her hubris in aiming high (not to mention her dizzying salary) deserved to be punished. This was followed by a fierce protectiveness when she was attacked: We wanted to see Couric, like Hillary, chastened but not persecuted.

[From Vogue]

Couric also goes in-depth about her now-infamous Sarah Palin interviews. The interviews were the first serious “vetting” Gov. Palin had received from the mainstream media. Post-election, some of the gossip coming out of the McCain campaign suggested that Couric was selected for Gov. Palin’s first media roll-out because the McCain campaign viewed a female journalist as being more sympathetic (i.e. “softer”) to Gov. Palin.

“An interview like that doesn’t come along very often,” Couric says now. “It was sort of a perfect storm in terms of timing, interest, my approach, all working together to make it impactful.”

While many liberals credit Couric, ably assisted by Tina Fey, with taking Palin down, Couric herself is adamant that the merit of the interview lay in her determination to “remain nonjudgmental. I was just a conduit to get her point of view out there.” Asked what went through her head as she asked the questions, she says, “I haven’t really talked about this.…It was fascinating for me to watch her formulate answers, and clearly she was struggling in some of the areas we discussed. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to say what she read.…But really I just wanted to listen to what she said.”

[From Vogue]

Other than the conversion to Judaism and the pregnancy, Campbell Brown’s interview is a little boring. But I am obsessed with all things Rachel Maddow, my imaginary “girlfriend.” The Rhodes scholar, Stanford graduate and “out” lesbian had a hit show the same week “The Rachel Maddow Show” premiered this September, in the nine p.m. timeslot after Olberman. Maddow talks a bit about wearing her liberalism on her sleeve, but still wanting to hold “bad ideas,” regardless of party affiliation, to account.

…What happens to a liberal commentator when a liberal ticket wins the White House and the Democrats control Congress? “I guess I’m interested in making fun of bad ideas, regardless of who has them,” she says. “Obviously you don’t want to randomly scour the world for bad ideas. You want to respond to influential bad ideas. So if you end up in a situation where there isn’t a loyal opposition, where the Republican Party is in disarray and isn’t really surfacing in the discussion, then they won’t be the people I’m making fun of. I will be making fun of the Democrats or the supposed experts.” In other words, an Obama presidency does not change what you might call her quest. “I’m interested in making fun of bad guys, wherever I find them,” she says…

At Stanford, she wanted to be an AIDS activist. At Oxford, in the late nineties, she helped start an AIDS-treatment activist group. She returned to America to write, and in the meantime fell into, first, local radio in Massachusetts, then Air America, which led to MSNBC. Now, on Friday afternoons, her partner, Susan Mikula, an artist, is waiting outside the NBC studios, ready to drive to the Berkshires; there, not too far from a river, they enjoy TV-free weekends—so TV-free, in fact, that Maddow had to ask a friend about The Colbert Report. She also consults with Mikula about what she should wear on cable.

[From Vogue]

Judging from the mainstream media’s reaction (or over-reaction) to the whole Blagojevich scandal, and whether it has anything to do with Barack Obama, I don’t think Maddow is alone is finding enough “bad ideas” in both parties.

Katie Couric is shown on 11/20/08. Credit: WENN