Friday, April 13, 2007

Katie to Critics: Don’t Blame the Pretty Face

Katie Couric came out swinging against her blogworld critics today, calling them “ignorant of the way major news bureaus work” for their reaction to the growing scandal of her plagiarizing a Wall Street Journal article on television.

“What people don’t understand is that in addition to being a hard-hitting interviewer, award-winning presenter, and accomplished story framer I’m an empty suit who doesn’t write her own copy.” Smiled Couric. “I can’t be held responsible for everything that gets stuck under my nose and I read on-air to hundreds of people. It’s not like I work for a famous news division or something.”

Other network executives agreed, blaming the so-called ‘blogosphere’ for blowing things out of proportion. Brian Williams of NBC had this to say: “This so-called scandal is just a bunch of jealous coke-bottle-glasses-wearing fat balding guys in underwear in their mother’s basement complaining about us real journalists, who understand that borrowing from each other is part of the game. We don’t have time to do a so-called ‘investigation’ of every little thing that we get. That’s just not the way the news cycle is supposed to work.”

Couric’s predecessor, Dan Rather, commented while wearing a tin-foil hat and a crazy expression. “I would propose that what happened is that this famously right-wing propaganda rag changed their internet time stamps and released past-dated newspapers to make it look like she stole their material, when in fact it was just the opposite. It’s a lot like how the Republican company Microsoft rushed out an updated version of Word in order to discredit my documents about Bush’s time in the Air National Guard, which were completely true.”

Network sources indicated that Couric’s final punishment would be light, if any. “We don’t really mind that she stole material from somebody else. We mind a little bit that she got caught. But we’re impressed that she was able to quickly shift blame to her producers, so we don’t think we’ll be doing any follow-up anytime soon.”


UPDATE: Boy, is my face red! I had "Chris Matthews" instead of "Brian Williams" above. Whoops!