She's not being particularly harsh, and she's pretty funny.  It's also awesome to see him being so uber concerned about his appearance and she being relatively flippant about hers--especially after he said such critical things.  His earlier comments seemed a little sexist to me, anyway.

But more importantly, how hilarious is it to hear Katie Couric say "dude" and "what up" and "I'm just laying some jewish guilt on you, bro."?   Yo, She's in tune with young kids.

I'm sure you're right with your observations about Dan Rather having a bruised ego.

However I have a feeling that it goes deeper than that - I think it's completely generational. He comes from news as being an all-boys club - look at his peer class of journalists - Morley Safer, Mike Wallace, the late Ed Bradley ... good ol' boy Dan took over for Walter Cronkite. He started in the 1950's, when Edward Morrow was king. And if you've seen Good Night, and Good Luck, I think it's an acurate representation of women in the media (ie serving as secretaries and a few lucky writers) ...

he didn't have to start working with women till the late 70's, with the likes of Connie Chung and Diane Sawyer ... none of this an excuse for behavior, just an observation.

As for Katie Couric, she's not my favorite female journalist out there, but she's doing her best, and getting weirdly unnecessary flack for it. Although, she's played the light, airy partner, meant to do the human interest/funny demonstrational pieces for both Bryant Gumble, and then Matt Lauer. They were always touted as the "serious" journalists, while Katie was left as the "feel good" woman.

She's been trying to break out of that particular type-casted box with this move to CBS, and I have nothing but respect for that.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges....

From what I remember reading Walter Cronkite was pushed aside when he left the anchor chair and Dan Rather had a hand in it happening.

Now while Mr. Rather might have been made the scapegoat for the report about Pres. Bush's time with the National Guard that Rather fronted...Rather was not shown the door because of Katie Couric.

So now he doesn't like how he was treated by CBS and is partially taking it out on Katie?

Maybe he should take a queue from Walter...and out-class the opposition.

While network news might bow to the will of the government and corporations at times here in the US...or even a lot of the times...that is not new news.  That struggle has been going on forever.  Edward R. Murrow was fighting that fight before anyone knew who Dan Rather was.

I've been writing a fake blog of Katie Couric for a while now, and while I'm no fan, I've come to admire her (in a way). Journalism as a whole has gone down in the past several years--she didn't create the situation, but she's certainly not helping.

One of my editors suggested I write about the "skit" she did sending up Dan Rather and his coat of many possibilities, and I did. But my heart wasn't in it. I agreed with her: he had it coming.

Here's the post, if interested: http://www.newsgroper.com/katie-couric/2007/11/15/coats-uggs-hip-yo/

She seems to spend most of the video genuinely obsessing over her collar the same way.

This is an amusing distraction, but in the end she has a long, long way to go before she ever gains the kind of stature and authority Rather (let alone Cronkite and Murrow) had, and then gets unceremoniously dumped by CBS in her own turn. Methinks it won't take 30 years this time.

i am in the business...and i must say, after seeing both videoes i saw nothing out of the ordinary...anchors, reporters are always obsessed with their appearance...making sure their hair, make-up (men and women), lighting and camera angles are just right...they notice if they have more/less air-time than a colleague and for reporters they are always pushing for the lead story in the newscast..."selling" their story as a better story than the other reporters...

 the news business has gone very downhill from murrow's days in the sense that the quality that is put out there is disappointing, but when you look at how many different places we can get the story we want, that the 6 o'clock news isn't as relevant as it was in his day...

thats all Ive got to say about that...