EDITORIAL: A trophy for Katie

OPINION:

Katie Couric’s ratings as anchorwoman for the CBS Evening News may be in the toilet, but her slanted reporting smells like roses to her media peers.

On Wednesday, Ms. Couric was bestowed with the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Journalism from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Most Americans have never heard of this award, but it is a useful indicator of what passes as worthy of respect in the Fourth Estate these days. In Ms. Couric’s case, the work wasn’t very respectable.

In short, she was praised for doing a demolition job on Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin during last year’s election campaign. The consequential timing of the attack helped the 5-foot-2-inch TV personality stand tall among the competition. Reliable Resources, a group at the Norman Lear Center within USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, stated that Ms. Couric was “honored for her extraordinary, persistent and detailed multi-part interviews with Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin which judges called a ’defining moment in the 2008 presidential campaign.’ ”

Defining indeed. Ms. Couric’s “gotcha” interview defined the partisan activism of the press in favor of Barack Obama’s campaign. Ms. Couric’s confrontational approach with Mrs. Palin was particularly noticeable when compared to the free pass she gave to the notoriously gaffe-prone Joseph R. Biden Jr., which CBS News gleefully promoted as a sit-down with the “close-talking, free-wheeling, ice-cream-eating Democratic nominee for Vice President.” Ms. Couric didn’t touch on then-Sen. Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease and neglected to ask about his recent admission that Hillary Rodham Clinton “might have been a better pick [as Mr. Obama’s running mate] than me.”

If nothing else, it was honest for USC to give an award named after Walter Cronkite to a biased successor sitting in Uncle Walt’s old chair at CBS News. Mr. Cronkite was shameless in his mischaracterizations of what was happening during the Vietnam War. As for Ms. Couric, we don’t blame her for preferring to look at the trophy case for validation rather than her viewership.