{"id":2828,"date":"2021-11-14T23:54:50","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T07:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shirscribe.com\/?p=2828"},"modified":"2021-11-14T23:54:54","modified_gmt":"2021-11-15T07:54:54","slug":"influential-journalism-katie-courics-interview-with-sarah-palin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shirscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/11\/14\/influential-journalism-katie-courics-interview-with-sarah-palin\/","title":{"rendered":"Influential Journalism: Katie Couric&#8217;s Interview with Sarah Palin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"CBS Exclusive: Gov. Sarah Palin\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-ZVh_u5RyiU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>So if you read last week\u2019s entry, you\u2019ll 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\u2019t happen. I did, however, get an internship there. It wasn\u2019t in the news department, but it was still MTV, in their Santa Monica offices. Only the Lord &nbsp;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was never really a fan of Katie\u2019s 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.&nbsp; I think I started watching it regularly about a year before she jumped ship to the CBS Evening News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay, a little bit ago I said I wasn\u2019t a fan of hers, and now that I think about it, I guess that\u2019s not true. I wasn\u2019t a fan of her work per say, her journalistic style. She came off to me as, I don\u2019t know, a bit mean, someone who would intimidate if she realized she could. &nbsp;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 &nbsp;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In a groundbreaking move, Couric left morning news to become the first woman to host a network\u2019s 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\u2019t know why but I\u2019ma just go with it) was the first woman to do it alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Apparently CBS saw the writing on the wall, \u2018cause Dan Rather was booted, and Katie Couric, the morning news darling, was brought in to shake things up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the situation Katie Couric found herself in \u2013 in the midst of failure \u2013 when the world was introduced to Sarah Palin. It wasn\u2019t long before folks began to realize that the Governor of Alaska may not have been well-suited for the office she now sought. That\u2019s when Couric pounced, securing an interview that I believe she thought would revive her hemorrhaging career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While Couric\u2019s interview \u2013 along with a litany of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d skits \u2013 may have helped people, (some of whom, may have even wanted John McCain as president), question if they really wanted &nbsp;someone like Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency, especially when the commander-in-chief would be &nbsp;a 72-year-old former cancer patient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Clearly, Trump has had presidential hopes for a long time, yet even though he\u2019s rich, he still wasn\u2019t quite, I don\u2019t know any other way of saying it other than pedigreed for the high office. Some might argue that George W. Bush wasn\u2019t either, but he was legacied, C student choking on a pretzel and pronouncing nuclear as new-cue-ler, be damned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While a certain segment of the population was making fun of Sarah Palin for all that she didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I chose to highlight this interview because I thought that it was a real turning point in history, Sarah Palin\u2019s whole campaign really. It\u2019s funny, in almost every presidential election I can remember, people always say this is the most important election we\u2019ve ever had, or something to that effect. They say if you don\u2019t vote for this person or that, you\u2019re life will be different. Yet whether it\u2019s been a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, I\u2019ve never felt the effect of the changing of the guard in my personal life. Maybe that\u2019s because I\u2019m outside of the tax-bracket that can feel the change, but it\u2019s always been the same for me.&nbsp; 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\u2019d never experienced racism before, but it just seemed like it was more frequent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was a time when people would treat you decently to your face even if they\u2019re 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\u2019t say the word, though some also said the word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019t remember the country being as divided as it got after Barack Obama was elected president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I\u2019m no political scholar, so I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While I don\u2019t claim that she was ready to be vice president, what I have learned over the years \u2013 and I\u2019ve worked with a wide variety of people, from high school dropouts to Harvard graduates \u2013 is that everyone has some form of genius in them. And just because mine isn\u2019t in the area yours is in or vice-versa, doesn\u2019t mean that either of us can look down on the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019re still feeling the effects of how she conducted her campaign today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So if you read last week\u2019s entry, you\u2019ll 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\u2019t happen. I did, however, get an internship&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/shirscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/11\/14\/influential-journalism-katie-courics-interview-with-sarah-palin\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,407],"tags":[420,418,281,410,177,421,419,424,423,422],"class_list":{"0":"post-2828","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-career-and-goals","7":"category-influential-journalism","8":"tag-influential-journalism","9":"tag-katie-couric","10":"tag-lessons-learned","11":"tag-mtv","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-presidential-elections","14":"tag-sarah-palin","15":"tag-today-show","16":"tag-vice-presidential-candidate","17":"tag-vice-presidential-candidate-2008","18":"entry"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Influential Journalism: Katie Couric&#039;s Interview with Sarah Palin - Shirscribe<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/shirscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/11\/14\/influential-journalism-katie-courics-interview-with-sarah-palin\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Influential Journalism: Katie Couric&#039;s Interview with Sarah Palin - Shirscribe\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So if you read last week\u2019s entry, you\u2019ll know that it was my dream to work at MTV. 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