If it weren't for a recent TV commercial, I would not know that Katie Couric, 59, is the new face of Yahoo! News - new only to me because she's been the anchor of Yahoo Global News since 2014, with an annual salary of $10 million.
Here's a video from about a month ago of Couric visiting Buffalo, NY, for a new Yahoo News series, "Rebuilding America," where you see Couric repeatedly doing the "I'm just an ingénue" gummy toothy grin that had first endeared her as "America's sweetheart" to NBC's Today audience so many years ago. (She was a co-anchor of Today beginning in 1991.)
Alas, when I see her gummy grin, all I can think of is what she once said about Middle America, as reported by Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast:
Katie Couric is feeling liberated.
Not because she is nearing the end of her five-year contract as CBS anchor-although there's an unexpected plot twist on that front-but because she's been spending less time in the studio. You can hear it in her voice.
"It's great for me to get out of the chair and into the world," she says. "I started out as a reporter, and I still enjoy reporting." [...]
That's why Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls "this great unwashed middle of the country" in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.
That's what this woman thinks of us - "unwashed" little people.
Frankly, at 59, Couric's gummy grin is more disingenuous than ingénue, if she ever was one.
