Is that gravitas in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

The scuttlebut is that TV news wags are worried that Katie Couric doesn't have enough gravitas to anchor the evening news. And according to one unnamed source quoted in a recent article in the New York Observer, even women want to hear a baritone voice relating the top events of the day:

Women like to get their news from other women in the morning,” the executive said, “and from men—husband figures—at night.”

As a journalism educator, I suppose that I should just stop teaching my female students who aspire to an anchor chair to focus on peripheral pursuits such as learning to write or report. We should just teach them to lower their voices the way actress Kathleen Turner did. I once recall her telling an interviewer that she practiced talking with balls in her mouth until she reached her trademark low register.

[By the way, Turner's website says she may be reprising her role as Chandler's trannie father on a "Friends" special rumored to be in the works.]

journalism