Katie Couric remembers somebody else's first library card.
by Andrew Ferguson
04/23/2007, Volume 012, Issue 30
Not long after I came to Wash ington to work as a junior editorial flunky, I went to a cocktail party at a think tank. (Attending cocktail parties at think tanks, I thought then, was one of the great perks of my job, which tells you all you need to know about the life of a junior editorial flunky.) There I met a fellow flunky--a flunkiette, you might call her, since she was even greener than I was, and much, much blonder. Her thankless job was to write speeches, op-eds, position papers, and other encyclicals under the name of the think tank's president. She was a ghost, in other words. A flunkiette ghost.
Comparing notes, we both mentioned our admiration for the wit, prose style, and intellectual range of a well-known newspaper columnist.
"He's the best," I said.
"Fabulous," she agreed.
Then, after a brief pause and a puzzled look, she said: "I wonder who writes his stuff."
That was 20 years ago, and when it comes to famous journalists, especially of the TV variety, the question haunts us still. Just last week a spokesman for CBS News revealed that an episode of "Katie Couric's Notebook," a one-minute video commentary distributed daily to CBS affiliates and posted on the CBS website, "was based on" a column by Jeffrey Zaslow that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal. "Was based on" is a euphemism used by TV people meaning "was stolen from." According to the spokesman, Katie "was horrified" to discover that the words that had come out of her mouth and had been published under her name were in fact the work of someone else.
No, wait--that can't be right. When she spoke and published the words, Katie had to know they weren't her own. When the words came out of her mouth, she thought they were the work of someone she had hired to put them there. In TV this someone is called a "producer," and several of them--very young, by all accounts, and most of them women--work at writing the commentaries that Katie presents as her "Notebook."
They are weightless little leaves, these commentaries. From the standard opening (Hi, everyone!) to the standard close (That's a page from my notebook), each runs to 160 words. As frontman for a corporate behemoth that relies for its revenue on the goodwill, or at least the toleration, of the vast, various, and extremely touchy American public, Katie can never express an opinion that might inspire someone to object. This lends her Notebook an anodyne quality. The subject matter ranges widely, but the treatment is uniformly mild. If, for example, the topic is teen promiscuity or the severely obese ("it's a growing problem, and the ones who are growing are us!" Katie opined), she views it with alarm, but the alarm is muted; if it's Al Gore's crusade against global warming, she lends her support, though with no particulars; if the subject is war and humanity's inclination to violence, she casts her eyes heavenward and wonders when, please God, it will all end. Not that she mentions God, or casts her eyes heavenward.
Often the commentaries come graced with a personal touch, that special Couric je ne sais quoi. Shuddering over the subject of sexual promiscuity, she told us: "I want my daughters to find real love when they're ready, and respect their bodies. My girls and I are going to have a little chat tonight . . . again." The plagiarized commentary, which was taken from a column by Zaslow about libraries, began: "I still remember when I got my first library card, browsing through the stacks for my favorite books." Yes indeed: The writerly life often begins in those stacks. Good times.
So you can't help but wonder, given the occasional personal gloss and their untaxing nature, why Katie felt it necessary to hire a staff to write the commentaries for her. The usual answer is that journalists like Katie are simply too busy to write. Though ghostwriting itself is at least as old as Cyrano de Bergerac, its appearance in the journalism trade is relatively recent. Dan Rather, who used to be as busy as Katie, would often go on and on about how television was a "writer's medium" and how "good writing" was essential to his "craft," and he put his money where his mouth was by hiring a bunch of writers to do his good writing for him. The TV journalist Tim Russert is not only enormously busy, he's a sentimental old poop. His love for his dad is so impossible to contain that he was moved to hire a ghostwriter--an expensive one, too, William Novak, author of the seminal Iacocca--to write about how much he loves his dad. I mean how much he, Tim, loves his dad. The first-person account was titled Big Russ and Me. Again, the Me in the title was supposed to be Tim, not Novak.
You can see how complicated ghostwriting can get to be, at least for some of us in the audience. It's almost postmodern in its dizziness, especially when it's used by people, such as journalists, who are themselves assumed to be professional writing folk. When, for instance, Katie peered into the camera with her sincerest gaze (though she was really peering into the teleprompter) and deplored teen promiscuity, was it Katie doing the deploring, or was it the ghost? Was it Katie's opinion, or the ghostwriter's opinion? When she said, "I'm going to have a talk with my girls tonight," did she, Katie, mean that she, Katie, was going to have a talk with Katie's girls, or did she, the ghostwriter, mean that she, the ghostwriter, was going to have a talk with Katie's girls, or maybe that she'd have a talk with her own, the ghostwriter's, girls? As the complications ramify, funhouse-fashion, the reader or viewer is tempted to strip away the complications altogether and simply assume that the whole commentary is a sham. It's entirely possible that, no matter what her Notebook says, Katie isn't really going to talk with her daughters about promiscuity tonight. It's entirely possible that Katie doesn't have any kids at all.
Among ghosts the cynicism must be even more thoroughgoing, and even less avoidable. Certainly it had Katie's poor plagiarizing producer in its grip, just as, in much milder form, it had gripped my flunkiette acquaintance 20 years ago. Of course there's never an excuse for plagiarism--the original writerly sin--but you can't help but see how odd the situation was that the ghostwriter found herself in, and from which she tried to escape through such extreme measures. She must have realized that in any ghost-employer relationship, someone is already and always a plagiarist. The distance from being a ghost to being a thief of words and ideas--or the distance from pretending other people's words are your own to actually stealing them--is not so great.
Or so it must have seemed to the budding writer/producer. A person becomes a writer from many motives, but chief among them is the desire for self-expression; to uncover your innermost thoughts, to clear away the underbrush and find what you really think, and then to put those thoughts onto paper (or the computer screen) in as appealing a form as you can devise. But this young ghost faced an even tougher task. She spent her days trying somehow to divine--or, failing that, to invent--the innermost thoughts of the remote, hugely famous, unfathomably wealthy woman who was her boss, and who will forever remain a stranger to her. Having been asked to steal Katie Couric's thoughts, assuming there are such, the ghost inched a bit further and stole Jeff Zaslow's instead. Then she passed Zaslow's thoughts off as--well, not her own, but as Katie's. What her own thoughts were, she probably no longer knew.
As a writer she'd been reduced to the role of middleman, merely the fence in an already tawdry transaction. And like all middlemen, she was easily replaced.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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