Katie Couric on Media’s ‘Capitulation’ to Trump: ‘A Good Old-Fashioned Shakedown’

Katie Couric — the former longtime Today host who now runs her own independent media company — spoke with Variety for the 20th anniversary of the beginning of her five-year tenure as CBS Evening News anchor.

Couric discussed the state of broadcast news today and why the “both sides” approach to reporting in an attempt to attract centrist audiences isn’t the solution. When asked by Variety if it was still possible to do a “straight-ahead newscast” in such a divided political climate, Couric said it is “very difficult for a number of reasons.”

“I think it probably would have been easier with a less polarizing president. But I think there is a significant segment of the population who believe that the Trump administration poses an existential threat to democracy, and for those people, to have a ‘both sides’ newscast is a violation for them of journalistic ethics,” she said. “Similarly, yes, some people think the election was rigged, and yet, are newscasts supposed to say these people believe the election was rigged despite absolutely zero evidence supporting that? I think we’re we have entered a new era of not only facts, but context and perspective and to repeat things that aren’t true, hoping this to appear unbiased is not the solution.”

Couric also criticized her former network and ABC. Last summer, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, paid a $16 million settlement to President Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The year prior, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ on-air allegation that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll

“I’d love to separate corporate from media, because I think that’s a real problem,” said Couric, referencing both networks. “That was obviously because they wanted the [Paramount/Skydance] merger to go through, and it was so obvious,” Couric said of the CBS settlement. “That, to me, is a real issue in media today, and I found that really deplorable. That level of capitulation was just incredibly disappointing to me.”

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She continued, “Similarly, the law firms that did that. They would argue that they would go under. I’ve talked to heads of some of these law firms, and my late husband’s law firm represented a lot of those who said, ‘We are not bowing to this kind of pressure.’ But it’s a good old-fashioned shakedown. And I haven’t seen a lot of profiles in courage during this really perilous time.”

Couric, who launched her independent media company Katie Couric Media in 2017, said that she is “lucky that I’m an independent journalist,” and that “when there’s something that deserves a certain amount of time and a conversation of a certain length, I’m able to do it.” She added, “I’m not operating from a place of fear, and that feels really good.”