Quotations from Neil Postman

"Voting...is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.  The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into - what else? - another piece of news.  Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence.  The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing."

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this:  that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre.  For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed.  Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete;  we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reali ty that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.  And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they, and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange."

from:

Amusing Ourselves To Death, by Neil Postman. 
Penguin Books edition, 1986
Part 1, Chapter 5
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Katie Couric walks away.

Katie Couric has signed off as CBS Evening News anchor after nearly five years.  Couric ended her last evening newscast by telling viewers:

 "Thank you so much for coming along with me on this incredible journey."

Well, isn't that precious?  Five years is an 'incredible journey'? 

Walter Kronkite didn't become Walter Kronkite in five years.  He began with CBS in 1950 after a dozen years of reporting around the world.  He was assigned anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1962 and stayed until his retirement in 1981 (19 years as anchor).
Tom Brokaw stayed until he retired.
Peter Jennings stayed until he died.
When Couric got the assignment in 2006, there was a lot of chatter about her being the first solo female anchor of a primetime network newscast.
She will go down in the history books with that distinction but she doesn't deserve it.  She quit.  She walked away.  The so-called 'challenge' of her 'incredible journey' wore out and she moved on because in the end, everything she does is about her.  That is the modern way.
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