Katie On Top Of The World

When Katie Couric was co-hosting the "Today Show" with Bryant Gumbel, the show's ratings went way up , and NBC was happy. Katie got a big office with a view. I went there to tape her for a magazine profile, and she walked me over to the windows that looked out on Saks Fifth Avenue. "Can you believe this?" she said, laughing.
There's a bit of a back-story . Katie and I met when we were both working at CNN, she in Atlanta, I in New York. Our coversations mostly took place over the phone. Katie: "Can you cut off early and give me another five minutes?" Chris: "No, I can't." She was a producer, I was "talent." (They call an on-air person "talent," even if that person is a dope.) Katie was ambitious, dedicated to journalism, and very smart.
But when CNN sent her to Washington, she was scared. She was assigned the task of showing up at the White House every morning, and telling the audience what the President would be doing that day. The first time she had to carry out the mission, she was sick to her stomach , but she put on her blazer, combed her hair, and went to the White House "so I could stand there and say,"' 'Today, President Reagan will be meeting with National Security advisor Zbigniew Brezhinski.' I was a disaster. I looked like I was fourteen, and my voice was awful."
In the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, never mind. Katie started taking voice lessons, and wrestling with what she called her midwestern twang. ("I said things like can-a-dit.") One day (twang notwithstanding) along came NBC and offered her the world. Or at least the "Today Show." She was great for the show, and the show was great for her. She travelled everywhere, she interviewed actors, writers, musicians, big shots and nut cases. In Tripoli, she attempted to pry words from Muamar Khadafi, while he sat in his tent swatting flies, and pretended he couldn't speak English. "The interview from hell," she called it, but somewhere along the way, she had found her confidence, and after that it was onward and upward. There were still worlds to conquer.
So Katie went to CBS to anchor the Nightly News. Who wouldn't be proud to sit where Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite had sat? But CBS never pulled out of third place in the ratings, and eventually, there came rumors that Katie might quit, Katie might be fired, Katie wasn't everybody's darling any more.
She soldiered on, until a couple of weeks ago when she did some interviews with Sarah Palin, the famous hockey mom, and according to the newspapers, those interviews were shown on YouTube "nearly six million times." So Katie's everybody's darling again. The fact is that I am mechanically challenged, and I don't even know what YouTube is, but it's worked for Katie. And I bet she's thinking, "Can you believe this?"