So if you read last week’s entry, you’ll know that it was my dream to work at MTV. Specifically, I wanted to cover the 2004 elections for that youth-focused channel. Well, that didn’t happen. I did, however, get an internship there. It wasn’t in the news department, but it was still MTV, in their Santa Monica offices. Only the Lord knows how hard I worked to get that internship. I mean I became a hustler, homie. Still, I managed to get fired after just two weeks.
However, as I got older I gravitated away from MTV and towards the more adult (Kurt Loder notwithstanding) network news, specifically the Today show. I wanted to host the Today show, and so naturally, I watched Katie Couric.
I was never really a fan of Katie’s as much as I was an observer. I was more so a fan of the news, particularly with the Today show, the variety of stories that they do. That mixture of hard news and fluff appealed to me. By the time I started watching the Today show regularly, Katie was almost on her way out. I think I started watching it regularly about a year before she jumped ship to the CBS Evening News.
Okay, a little bit ago I said I wasn’t a fan of hers, and now that I think about it, I guess that’s not true. I wasn’t a fan of her work per say, her journalistic style. She came off to me as, I don’t know, a bit mean, someone who would intimidate if she realized she could. However, I did admire the trajectory of her career. Even before I knew about the trajectory of her career I was in awe of her status on the Today show. You could just tell, none of her colleagues wanted to fuck with her, not even Matt Lauer. I doubt if he ever pulled that sexual harassment shit on her. She was the undisputed star of that show. She definitely had ( or at least it appeared to me) the fear and or respect of her colleagues and definitely the network because they paid her handsomely. And when her contract was up, she turned down big bucks to stay, and decided to leave.
In a groundbreaking move, Couric left morning news to become the first woman to host a network’s evening news on her own. Barbara Walters had done it before with a male partner, but Couric (notice how I went from calling her Katie to Couric, and I don’t know why but I’ma just go with it) was the first woman to do it alone.
It was an interesting time when this was all happening. Youth culture was really taking over, helped immensely by this thing called the internet, a new Wild, Wild, West, if you will, where there were things like Napster and Limewire; facebook, MySpace and Friendster. Meanwhile, the networks had three white male senior citizens anchoring the evening news.
Apparently CBS saw the writing on the wall, ‘cause Dan Rather was booted, and Katie Couric, the morning news darling, was brought in to shake things up.
And shake things up she did. If memory serves me right, she even got rid of the desk anchors always sit behind, and brought more light-hearted pop-culture-y type stories to the evening news. After an initial boost in ratings, probably due to curiosity, CBS Evening news was in last place behind the other two. They brought the desk back, along with the hard-hitting news.
This is the situation Katie Couric found herself in – in the midst of failure – when the world was introduced to Sarah Palin. It wasn’t long before folks began to realize that the Governor of Alaska may not have been well-suited for the office she now sought. That’s when Couric pounced, securing an interview that I believe she thought would revive her hemorrhaging career.
While Couric’s interview – along with a litany of “Saturday Night Live” skits – may have helped people, (some of whom, may have even wanted John McCain as president), question if they really wanted someone like Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency, especially when the commander-in-chief would be a 72-year-old former cancer patient.
Obviously the answer is no, they did not. All though then Senator Barack Obama went on to win handily, the seeds that Sarah Palin planted with uneducated whites, and the white working class did not get discarded. On Election Night 2008, after John McCain, conceded his defeat, Donald Trump came along and took advantage of the door Palin left cracked ajar, and kicked it wide open.
Clearly, Trump has had presidential hopes for a long time, yet even though he’s rich, he still wasn’t quite, I don’t know any other way of saying it other than pedigreed for the high office. Some might argue that George W. Bush wasn’t either, but he was legacied, C student choking on a pretzel and pronouncing nuclear as new-cue-ler, be damned.
While a certain segment of the population was making fun of Sarah Palin for all that she didn’t know, another was feeling seen for the first time in a long time because of her. They were larger than many would think, and Donald Trump capitalized on it.
I chose to highlight this interview because I thought that it was a real turning point in history, Sarah Palin’s whole campaign really. It’s funny, in almost every presidential election I can remember, people always say this is the most important election we’ve ever had, or something to that effect. They say if you don’t vote for this person or that, you’re life will be different. Yet whether it’s been a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, I’ve never felt the effect of the changing of the guard in my personal life. Maybe that’s because I’m outside of the tax-bracket that can feel the change, but it’s always been the same for me. That is until Barack Obama got elected. After he took office it felt like I experienced racism more, nothing too major, but just enough for me to recognize that I was given inferior treatment in certain situations. Not that I’d never experienced racism before, but it just seemed like it was more frequent.
There was a time when people would treat you decently to your face even if they’re calling you a nigger behind your back. Sarah Palin ran a campaign with such thinly-veiled racism, that people had no longer ashamed to treat you like a nigger to your face, even if they didn’t say the word, though some also said the word.
Growing up in Los Angeles, in the 80s and 90s and even in the early aughts, including when I went to Republican strongholds like Georgia and Bakersfield, CA back in those days, I don’t remember the country being as divided as it got after Barack Obama was elected president.
And I’m no political scholar, so I’m sure you could trace it back to many things, but I trace it back to the campaign ran by Sarah Palin coupled with the dismissive way the media treated her.
While I don’t claim that she was ready to be vice president, what I have learned over the years – and I’ve worked with a wide variety of people, from high school dropouts to Harvard graduates – is that everyone has some form of genius in them. And just because mine isn’t in the area yours is in or vice-versa, doesn’t mean that either of us can look down on the other.
Sarah Palin may not have been an erudite scholar, but she was masterful at having a way with people, so much so that even though she lost over 12 years ago, we’re still feeling the effects of how she conducted her campaign today.
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