A 15 year old Russian girl gymnast wrestled the knife away from a man who tried to rape her, and stabbed him in the back with it.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/08/30/016.html

Nice that after the basic facts of CBS skinnifying Couric via Photoshop are out of the way, the NYP's linked article can so helpfully tell women how to lose weight, including a diet expert who recommends how Couric can change her lifestyle to get to the "great" picture. Hello? Missing the point? Katie Couric is not fat! Were she to lose as much weight as they depicted her to lose, she would be underweight. Period.

It's maddening. A woman reaches the pinnacle of her career path and has to be scolded for not being anorexic and Photoshopped to meet an unreasonable and unhealthy looks standard? This is what we're supposed to settle for as progress? I guess we're supposed to take away from this story that breaking the glass ceiling is nice, but we should be prepared that upstairs there are glass walls, too, the better to subject us to the "male gaze" and its associated parade of horribles. Charming.

for The Singularity. Once I have been re-instantiated in software I too will be able to benefit from the benefits of digital manipulation - all the time!

my reaction to the whole Couric-slim-down story is a big "So what?" Why are we surprised by the shallowness of any major television "news" organization these days? It would be news if they hired a real journalist to anchor the news. Katie Couric's not fit that bill for ages, if she ever did. And why are we surprised by Barbara Walters' comments? She's in the same boat as Katie.

Is it sad that we aren't surprised? Perhaps. But I've long since stopped having high expectations for TV news coverage, let alone the people the networks put in front of the teleprompter.

While news outlets tackle this non-story, folks in New Orleans are still homeless a year later. NPR or Marketplace Radio had a Robert Riech piece this morning about how the new New Orleans is minus a good percentage of its poor, who haven't had the money to a) rebuild or b) return. To me, that is truly disturbing, not whether CBS has played with the photographed image of a multimillionaire news reader.

The truth is that in the past few years, television news has been about having pretty people read sanitized news, not "journalism". Making things look prettier than they are is simply what the news channels do. I am less offended when they do it to Katie Couric than I am when they do it to George Bush and the Iraq War.

Thank you for highlighting this, seriously. It's a good callout - this just makes CBS look like an ass.

It might seem innocuous, but this is the sort of subtle messaging that women get everywhere. And cumulatively it's damaging. Katie laughs it off gracefully, but she should rightfully be pissed.

I wonder if they performed the same treatment (de-aging) on any of the male "newspersons"?

There's a crisis in American journalism right now. That's how we ended up in Iraq. It's not really about gender. Journalists are bending reality all over the place, by erasing unwanted pounds from the news, not just the newscasters.

Here's my latest favorite example. You can always find a reason to mock and abuse the so-called news media in this country when you read NORML news and see what doesn't get covered.

For example, Alzheimer's disease is a terrible illness that devastates families and imposes a horrific financial and emotional burden on Americans, right?

So you'd THINK the press would jump up and down when science reveals a potent weapon against this illness, one that seems able to relieve the symptoms and halt progression of the disease.

So can anyone remember this story being reported last week?

Cannabinoid May Halt Alzheimer's Progression, Study Says

August 17, 2006 - La Jolla, CA, USA

La Jolla, CA: THC inhibits the formation of amyloid plaque, the primary marker for Alzheimer's disease (AD), far more effectively than approved medications, according to preclinical data to be published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

Investigators at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California reported that THC inhibits the enzyme responsible for the aggregation of amyloid plaque in a manner "considerably superior" to approved Alzheimer's drugs such as donepezil and tacrine.

"Our results provide a mechanism whereby the THC molecule can directly impact Alzheimer's disease pathology," researchers concluded. "THC and its analogues may provide an improved therapeutic [option] for Alzheimer's disease [by]... simultaneously treating both the symptoms and the progression of [the] disease."

It wasn't reported anywhere. The media didn't pick it up at all. This news was silenced.

Obviously the reason why journalists don't ever cover these kinds of stories is -- they don't want to project some kind of pro-marijuana image to the public. So they're Photoshopping the truth away by just not reporting it.

I think it's dreadful that they Photoshopped Katie Couris but this goes in line with the way they give people market-researched news, specially prepared to send the right message to the right demographic, as opposed to just trying to report the truth, even when it conflicts with their desire to send a particular message.

This is about way more than gender. I worry that making it about gender keeps the full problem of American journalism from being addressed.

Maybe some people were shocked about this Katie Couric story. Not me. I'm way more shocked about the Alzheimer's story, because that's actually more important to more people in a more dire and desperate way.

the network news has become so "viewized" except for fox's combination of right wing resentment and allegedly hot babes that I suspect the alteration was done more for the benefit of the female audience.

As this admittedly middle-aged and now, distressingly paunchy guy know, Katie is just fine as she is. What's more, just because she did a morning show for years doesn't mean she isn't smart.

The problem is in the entertainment-news machine.

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