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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Desperate to turn the "Good Morning America" vs. "Today" ratings battle into a catfight, the press has all but ripped Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer's dresses off and tossed them in a swimming pool. How tedious.
Jun 3, 2005 | Who doesn't love a catfight? High-pitched squealing, bitch-slapping, biting, scratching, hair-pulling, clothes-ripping: so hot.
Female-on-female combat is in fact so tantalizing, so satisfying, so fetishized by the American public, that we literally cannot get enough of it. When we're not filled up after an episode of "Desperate Housewives," we gobble magazine stories about how the "Desperate" actresses yell at each other at photo shoots. When we are bored because it's been too long since we fantasized about a Hillary Clinton-Condoleezza Rice presidential cage match in 2008, we perk ourselves up by imaginatively pitting Clinton against former librarian and unlikely presidential candidate Laura Bush. And when we want to write a story about a media rivalry between two massively financed morning television institutions like "Today" and "Good Morning America," we make the story tastier by serving up a tale of hand-to-hand combat between Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric.
Painting powerful women as long-nailed, sharp-toothed competitors -- which, incidentally, they sometimes are, just like their male peers -- is a digestible way of dealing with them. We can marginalize them as shrieky playground girls, thereby turning them from real-life professionals into familiar and unthreatening caricatures of femininity.
Despite the recent earth-shattering revelations of New York Times columnist John Tierney claiming that women don't have the same stomach for competition -- icky! -- as men do, you'd never know it from the still rolling avalanche of coverage of the reported battle between "Today" show co-host Katie Couric and "Good Morning America" co-host Diane Sawyer. Last week came a cover package in the New York Observer; this week it's New York magazine; coming soon is Ken Auletta's take on the tale in the New Yorker. This particular season of diva-baiting has been pegged to May sweeps numbers that show "GMA" making major ratings gains on decade-long champ "Today." But it was really kick-started by last month's New York Times piece by Alessandra Stanley in which, without any indication that she had spoken to sources at "Today," Stanley claimed that staffers "dart behind doors and douse the lights" at the sound of Couric's "clickety stiletto heels" coming down the hall. Her thesis was that "GMA" is gaining ground on "Today" solely because viewers prefer Sawyer -- whom Stanley described as oozing "creamy insincerity" -- to Couric.
The notion that consumers would choose their morning show based simply on which female co-host -- according to Stanley's dim view of both women -- they disliked least is amplified by the cover of this week's New York, which blares: "Divas at Dawn: How Diane Sawyer Ate Katie Couric's Breakfast." The cover bears an image of a frighteningly mascaraed Couric, looking snippily over her shoulder at a glamorous Sawyer, who wears a shit-eating feline grin. The women might as well be slathered in mud, wearing Krystle and Alexis name tags, the "Dynasty" theme playing in the background.
It's a terrific cover.
But the thing is, it's a manipulation -- a manipulated image and a manipulated story. Couric and Sawyer may or may not be "divas." Their shows are, and have always been, engaged in a tense ratings duel. But to pretend that the rivalry comes down to a girl-war, to personal hair-pulling over every viewer lost and gained, is a convenient fantasy.
There are a lot of factors that go into the wars between "Today" and "GMA." Like the fact that ABC has hit prime-time shows -- there's "Desperate Housewives" again -- that draw viewers in the morning. A more reserved piece about "GMA's" gains in the Times on Monday reported that the day after the "Desperate" season finale, "GMA" had 600,000 more viewers than "Today," but lost the next morning by more than 800,000. The Times also reported that "GMA" has a crack talent booker who has scored them Mariah Carey and U2, appearances that are sure to draw audiences.
In New York, reporter Meryl Gordon admits that "the remarkable turnaround is about more than a popularity contest between Sawyer and Couric" and that "the current revival of Good Morning America is a result not just of the popularity of Sawyer and Gibson and ABC's prime-time success, but of years of tinkering." She quotes television analyst Andrew Tyndall, who claims that morning television dominance usually runs in eight- to 10-year cycles. "Today" has been number one for almost a decade, putting it awfully close to its natural expiration date. And yet, somehow, all of these factors get boiled down to "Divas at Dawn."
Gordon writes, "If Today or GMA were to cover the story, they'd be virtually bound by the dictates of morning-TV-speak to call it a catfight, a characterization they both, of course, would resist." Here is the acknowledgment that there is something cheap and exploitative about terming this kind of rivalry a catfight. And here also is the moment at which New York does it anyway. "Regardless," writes Gordon, "right now, Diane & Co. are drawing almost all of the blood."
