Oh, Katie
Increasingly, it's getting harder to find much appealing about Katie Couric. I know a lot of people loathe her (my wife included), but I always found her likeable, perky in a way that didn't grate, and generally speaking someone I felt like I should be sympathetic to, especially after losing her husband.
In truth, I never think or thought about her much at all. But, if pressed, the above is pretty much what I would have thought and said.
But this is pretty pathetic -- her video diary, talking about her first library card, was apparently plagiarized, and Couric didn't even know about it. I would think that for $15 million a year, she could at least take a stab at writing about her own personal history.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric may vividly recall her first library card, but the network says she was unaware that her online video essay about the virtues of libraries was largely a work of plagiarism.
CBS News said this week the April 4 installment of "Katie Couric's Notebook" consisted mostly of passages lifted verbatim from a Wall Street Journal column by Jeffrey Zaslow that was published in March.
...
Although the text for the minute-long video was written in first person -- introduced by Couric with the line, "I still remember when I got my first library card" -- Couric did not compose the piece herself and was unaware that much of it was plagiarized, Genelius said.
"She was stunned, and very upset," Genelius said on Wednesday. "It's the same reaction we all had."
The mishap comes as CBS continues to lag in third place in the network news ratings, behind ABC and NBC, seven months after Couric's much-ballyhooed debut as the first woman solo anchor of a major U.S. evening newscast -- for a salary reportedly worth $15 million a year.
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The author of The Daily Background blog, Arlen Parsa, faulted Couric for letting others write her own commentaries.
Genelius said Couric met with a group of producers weekly to discuss upcoming topics for her "Notebook" video essays, and "she does write some of them herself."
"Sometimes the text is written by the producer," she added. "That's the way television generally works. It's a very collaborative medium."
This is pretty much the same thing as Charles Barkley claiming he was misquoted in his autobiography, but not nearly as funny.