Another Woman Fails in a High Profile Leadership Role

@msolga,

msolga wrote:

Quote:
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Deadly.
Could you expand on that a bit, please?
I'm genuinely interested.

It's a late 19th century poem of Rudyard Kipling, and very much out of fashion these days. I think he was referring to the relatively more practical and single minded approach women were presumed to take to important issues than many men.

Here's a few more verses that make the point;

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the others tale -
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations, worm and savage otherwise,
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise;
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger; Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue - to the scandal of the Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity - must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions - not in these her honor dwells -
She, the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else

1 Reply

@engineer,

Code:

If CBS was in last place for thirteen years, why would you consider Couric's performance as any different from her predecessors?

Courics opinion has no validity....she had very good ratings for the first two weeks, which shows that viewers are willing to move. Her job was not to keep distant third place, it was to improve performance.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

I thought it was Sean McManus's job to improve performance.

1 Reply

@engineer,

Quote:

I thought it was Sean McManus's job to improve performance.

It is...

Dont get me wrong, the problems at CBS News run deep, they never recovered from Rather, and the rounds of cost cutting (employee purges) have been brutal. A great deal of energy and expense was expended to bring in Couric, who was supposed to save the day by way of changing the patina to something more popular, and she failed. I am confident that if she could speak freely that she would argue that the plan was unrealistic, that one does not sweep the problems of CBS under the rug by changing the face on the nightly news. My argument is that she knew what she was getting into and she claimed at the front end that she could do what was asked of her, so she failed. I look forward to her book someday, I am open to being convinced that she naively got into a hopeless situation. I would still need a good faith argument for why she thought that all of her sensitivity and emoting might be something that the audience would want to buy. When I think of successful journalists I usually think of people who were hard charging and hard hitting.

0 Replies

@georgeob1,

Quote:

It's a late 19th century poem of Rudyard Kipling, and very much out of fashion these days. I think he was referring to the relatively more practical and single minded approach women were presumed to take to important issues than many men.

Ah.
Thank you for obliging, George.
Now I need to read the poem again a couple of times & let Kipling's words sink in!
Very interesting perspective!

0 Replies

@hawkeye10,

Utterly irrevant as respects the qualifications of professional women.

Couric is a marketable product.

If a mistake was made it was to allow her to influence her branding.

She achieved success at Today being the perky, quirky newcomer who provided a fresh presence for the tired morning new format.

Understandably, she wasn't content with being so characterized, but why did any of her employers really care?

This is a very common mistake made in the entertainment arena (and let's face it, morning "news" programs fall squarely within this arena)...take a profitable product and allow it to become unprofitable because of the personal desires of the product.

Thus we have the saying "Jumping the Shark."

Thus we also have "musical event" episodes imposed on long standing popular TV dramas, and abortions, lesbian affairs, child molestation, and global warming concerns intruding on situational comedies.

Couric was well over her head when she assumed the entirely manufactured pinnacle of "network anchor." Her ultimate failure was a forgone conclusion.
As an "anchor" she had to jettison the quirky, perky qualities that brought her fame in the first place. Instead she had to be a "hard hitting" harridan whose greatest achievment was to catch Sarah Palin in a gotcha question about the newspapers she reads.

It's no coincidence, normal aging process notwithstanding, that Katie has become a sexless and dour spinster figure. Unlike Christiane Amanpour, Couric never had the core skills and confidence to project professional expertise and intelligent sexuality.

It's hard to feel sorry for Katie since she has made millions from her career, but she wasn't served well by the networks or her own self-importance. Irrespective of how ground breaking her appointment to the anchor of the CBS nightly news might have been, she will not be remembered as a pioneer.

Actually this is good news for women. We are at a stage when gender doesn't really matter. If you suck as a network news anchor and are a man or a woman, you're going to fail.

Couric's demise has nothing, at all, to do with her gender

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

Couric's demise has nothing, at all, to do with her gender

I dont believe that, because if she were a man she likely would have done a much better job sizing up her skills and comparing them to what was required, and thus would have told the bosses who were trying to get her to take a hike. Men are much better at taking inventory before entering the battlefield, and if they come up short looking for a way to avoid the conflict. Women tend to go in with a optimism that is divorced from reality. The only man I can think of who came close to making the Couric mistake to anything near the degree she did was Max Robinson at ABC, and that was a very long time ago.

2 Replies

@hawkeye10,

Well, if you really believe that, I don't think I'll try to pursuade your otherwise.

0 Replies

Quote:

CBS clearly counted on Ms. Couric’s star power and the breakthrough of a woman commanding the anchor chair to help capture those new viewers. But the network strategists did not anticipate how difficult it would be to reverse decades of ratings erosion, or that CBS would continue to decrease staff members at the news division.

They also did not foresee that internal resentment over Ms. Couric’s salary would continue to fester. Most of all, they did not anticipate the depth of the opposition they would face over their efforts to alter the newscast.

“Her hiring has often been described as a Hail Mary pass,” said Judy Muller, a former news correspondent for CBS and ABC, now an associate professor at the Annenberg journalism school at the University of Southern California. “I think it was much more akin to throwing a grenade. In an effort to try to create something completely new, CBS management just blew up the place.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/business/media/11couric.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Quote:

Ms. Couric and Mr. Hartman immediately set out to remake the newscast. “For us it was: we’ve got nothing to lose,” said Mr. Hartman. “If you were in the position we were in, why not do something big and bold and ambitious?”

As I asserted earlier, Couric is not just a news reader, she was intimately involved with the design of the show, and also picking staff assignments.

0 Replies

Which in now way authorizes that bullshit about a "high profile leadership role." You really do hate just about everybody, don't ya, Rapist Boy?

1 Reply

Global National hired a female anchor, Dawna Friesen*, last year, and in my opinion she's horrible, not because she's a woman, i just don't think she's a good anchor, i would have much rather they gave the job to one of the two female anchors from the weekend addition, my first choice would have been Carolyn Jarvis, followed by Robin Gill

* although i do get to tell myself a great joke every night when she introduces herself, "I'm Dawna Friesen" (rhymes with freezin'), and i get to say, "well you should put a coat on"

0 Replies

@Setanta,

Quote:

Which in now way authorizes that bullshit about a "high profile leadership role

The problem for you is that people who know much more about the business than you keep using language that indicates that I am correct.

Howard Kurtz

Quote:

In hindsight, Couric recognizes that her initial revamping of the broadcast—larding it with guest commentaries and nine-minute interviews with the likes of Michael J. Fox—was a miscalculation

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-25/katie-couric-on-her-contract-cbs-and-love-of-the-campaign-trail/full/

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

That was a complete--and for you, typical--non sequitur. That quote does not characterize Couric as having been in a high profile leadership role. Saying that she miscalculated, or that she proved not to have been the right person for the job, doesn't even remotely make the job a "high profile leadership role."

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Quote:

That quote does not characterize Couric as having been in a high profile leadership role.

CBS news has over 1200 people, Couric according to Kurtz was a primary designer of its flagship product, plus she is the face of the flagship product, plus she is the lead editor of the flagship product, and you want to argue about my assertion that Couric has a high profile leadership role ??!!

What does it take to pass the bar according to you.........is Obama in a high power leadership role?

0 Replies

Couric's position was a leadership position, according to your distorted views, for 1200 people. Twelve hundred people, Bubba--there's more than 300 hundred million in this country. That makes Mr. Obama's job high profile. It equally makes the jobs of the secretaries of the executive branch and the members of Congress high profile leadership positions. What's really hilarious, though, is that you're whining about Couric having trashed the networks news show rating, but claiming she's high profile. Her profile must not have been high enough with very many people.

As i have already point out earlier, people don't look to network news anchors to provide them their political and social beliefs. Your bullshit here makes leadership a meaningless term.

0 Replies

Oh, and allow me to point out once again that it appears that you hate everybody.

0 Replies

@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

Men are much better at taking inventory before entering the battlefield, and if they come up short looking for a way to avoid the conflict. Women tend to go in with a optimism that is divorced from reality.

My observation is completely the opposite. I find women in general to underestimate their capabilities while men are vastly overconfident. But more to your point, Couric was hired with a specific game plan in mind - change the style of the broadcast in an effort to shake up the CBS rating slide. She executed that game plan, but it turns out it was a bad plan. If a coach (McManus) gives a quarterback (Couric) a bad game plan and the quarterback executes it perfectly but loses, is it the fault of the quarterback or the coach? If the team is a big time underdog and the coach comes up with a risky but audacious plan, do we slam the coach for trying something outside the box or do we encourage him to continue with the same failing game plan so that he loses respectably instead of losing badly? I don't have a problem with CBS saying they gave it a good try but they are going back to the standard game plan, but I disagree that McManus was wrong to try to change things up and that Couric failed to execute the plan she was given. T0 continue the analogy, Couric is a passing QB and CBS wants to return to a running game based offense, so she's out. That doesn't mean she isn't a good passer, she's just more Archie Manning than Joe Namath: not good enough to do it all without a full supporting cast.

1 Reply

@engineer,

Here we have the coach going out to get a new QB, one who he wants to throw the hail marry pass on first down. This new QB says "sure, I can do that", takes a boatload of money, comes over, spends three months before game helping the coach reformat the offence, and then proceeds to fail to get the ball where it needs to go down after down, tweak after tweak, while looking she like is the wrong QB to be throwing hail marries in the first place..

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

I think the new QB did throw the hail Mary pass, it just fell incomplete, likely because most hail Mary's do. It's a low probability play you only do when you are desparate.

0 Replies

Another Woman Fails in a High Profile Leadership Role

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know