Katie’s Debut: A Plain-Spoken Style

Katie Couric clearly wanted to anchor a plain-spoken and accessible newscast tonight.
Her intros and voiceovers displayed a sensibility toward middle Americans.

“It was the first front in the war on terror, and in Afghanistan now the Taliban are back with a vengeance,” she said at the top of the broadcast.

Then a few minutes later, she led into a package about Bush’s speech with this: “The war on terror began, of course, with the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.” Correspondent Jim Axelrod struck a similar tone: “Essentially, Katie, this is a stick-with-me speech,” he recapped.

After her first commercial break, Couric read this intro to the oil discovery story: “The folks at Chevron today felt like they won the lottery when they announced that they struck oil in the Gulf of Mexico…”