"the family"

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/flanagan-couric
"A Woman's Place"
by Caitlin Flanagan
The Atlantic
January / February 2008

Basically this article discusses Flanagan's relation to Couric (and perhaps by extension Couric's relation to the bulk of her base), first while on the Today show, and later at CBS. Concerning the discussion of the Today show: it is eerie how closely Flanagan's account follows Bradbury's account of "the family" in Fahrenheit 451. Flanagan writes, of the current Today show:

"It’s as pleasant as it ever was, but it will never have the urgency it held for me when Katie was there, because I will never again be the mother of small children—abruptly cast adrift from the routines of adult life, cloistered, lonely. I met Katie Couric once, and although she was very nice to me, I was disappointed. We sat on chairs under studio lights and talked, and I hope she didn’t guess what I really wanted to tell her: once, you were my closest friend."

What this indicates, maybe, is that being a stay-at-home parent can be really shitty. I mean, your closest friend was someone you couldn't talk to, never met, who was in many ways a fake (i.e. she was playing a part, albeit very well). Indeed, it is interesting that Flanagan was very concerned with Couric's off-screen persona - perhaps because this was important in reassuring her that it was all not, after all, fake. So perhaps a question is: how can we do this better? Is this an artifact of the suburbs? Ditching the system of stay-at-home parenting? Communal parenting? And by this last I don't mean anything like the kibbutzim. I mean something more like play-groups: where nuclear families are not locked into their own homes, isolated from each other, but in fact have some contact with each other throughout the day.

When it comes to Flanagan's discussion of the CBS segment, her analysis was less... eerie? Objectionable? Basically she argues that Couric, once she tried to conquer what was for her (given her past) the summit of broadcast news (the nightly news), the last bastion of male privelege, she failed, because of sexism. But, Flanagan argues, she never should have tried for it - because in the modern world, the nightly news is no longer the pinnacle of journalistic achievement. As it happens, Flanagan is right: the nightly news is on its way out, at least as far as total dominance of the news goes. But it is still disheartening to see the kind of sexism, latent or patent, that resulted in Couric doing badly. But perhaps this sort of thing is on its way out with the evening news.

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Of course, just look at movie trailers. Don LaFontaine is dead, but everyone who's replaced him has that same voice: deep, masculine, etc:

http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=10787&count=0
"Women Struggle in the Trailer Narration Business"
WorstPreviews

" "Audiences, including females, are so used to hearing a male voice that when they hear a female voice they think something is wrong," says Michael Camp, creative advertising executive at 20th Century Fox. "The public is finicky, and it takes them a while to trust voices they aren't used to hearing. And the voice they were used to for many years was Don's."On the rare occasion that trailer houses suggest using a female voice, studios often nix the idea. "A female voice might take away from the content of the trailer," says producer Christine Peters (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). "If the industry does transition to more frequently using female voiceovers, I imagine it will take the audience awhile to get used to it." "

(oddly, LaFontaine was clearly in favor of a woman being his successor).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJMGS7l0wT8
(an amusing yet exemplary example of LaFontaine in action)