The breakthrough that Couric’s ascension represents is not about women being “taken seriously” in the old-fashioned, male-defined sense. Broadcast journalists from Nancy Dickerson to Jane Pauley to Christiane Amanpour have won those battles. Couric belongs on a newer, more complicated end of the social-progress spectrum, along with Oprah Winfrey and Tina Fey: female TV personalities who have become big stars by being a certain kind of smart and confident and tough and funny—and uniquely female. Their gender, at this social and historical moment, permits them to be more interesting and entertaining and beloved than men with the same job descriptions. (Viewers could care less if Couric was less-than-beloved by some of her colleagues at NBC—and if she were a man, such reports of diva behavior would’ve had no traction.) One simply can’t imagine a male Oprah, or a male Katie. In a man, their most effective attributes, the ones that engender appeal and trust, would seem … so gay. No male news anchor, especially one suspected of a gravitas deficiency, would dare say to a reporter, as Couric recently did, “It’s been an out-of-body experience to watch these major news events unfold in my pajamas.”

She’s out of her pajamas now, and ready to go—even though the shrinking audience for the nightly news shows is only half as big as when she got into the game. “The challenge,” she said, “is to make the evening news a go-to place again.” Which is a huge, maybe impossible task, no matter how new and improved her version turns out to be. I asked about her ­excitement-to-terror ratio on the eve of showtime. “About 20:80,” she said, apparently in all seriousness.

Email: emailandersen@aol.com.

Related:

• Archive: “The Imperial City”
• Articles by Kurt Andersen
• Table of Contents: Sep 11, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!