NEW YORK — Every weekday evening, Katie Couric is the picture of sobriety on the “CBS Evening News”: buttoned-down and earnest.
Viewers who miss the impish humor the anchor exhibited on “Today” probably don’t know that it’s still possible to catch glimpses of Couric, unplugged — and in a medium that’s light-years away from the staid environs of broadcast news.
Since February, Couric quietly has been uploading videos to her own channel on YouTube. The clips display the mischievous and often hammy personality that the newscaster doesn’t get to show in her current post.
Along with extended material from her CBS interviews, much of the footage consists of behind-the-scenes moments with a lighthearted Couric. During a visit to CNN for an interview in March, she snapped the back of Larry King’s suspenders as he escorted her into a studio.
On a flight to Washington, D.C., to interview Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in February, she held a mascara stick and joked that, “It takes a village to make this face presentable on television.”
Filmed at a time of feverish speculation about how much longer she will stay on the third-place broadcast, the videos offer a jarring contrast to the recent spate of stories about the grim situation on the “CBS Evening News.” In the clips, she chortles and grins widely, whether she’s teasing photographers from the New York Post, singing in her SUV or sitting shoeless on the floor of her office talking to mommy bloggers.
Couric, who drew a huge spotlight when she took the CBS anchor post in 2006, largely has avoided interviews since then. (She declined a request for comment on this story.) But in recent weeks, the anchor offered several sharp public critiques of the media, including a video entry on her CBS News blog in which she assailed the media for not calling out the sexism that Clinton confronted in this year’s presidential campaign.
Her YouTube videos share the same unrestrained spirit. In one, she makes an allusion to the pressing questions about her future. As she adjusted her suit before going on the air Super Tuesday, Couric said: “I wore this in 2006, too, and I didn’t lose my job, so that’s positive.” Later in the night, the cheerleader emerged: “How we feeling, everybody?” she asked during a break, clapping her hands enthusiastically. “Whoo! I’m such a nerd, I’m sorry. I have to do something to keep myself fired up.”
The YouTube channel was largely Couric’s idea, in part a reaction to the pirated videos of her that turned up in recent months on comedian Harry Shearer’s site, My Damn Channel, according to people familiar with the project. One of those videos, which shows Couric joking with producers between live shots on New Hampshire primary night, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.
But Couric’s YouTube channel has garnered little notice, perhaps because neither she nor CBS News has done anything to promote it.
Most of all, the footage spotlights the irreverence that won Couric so many fans on “Today.” In one clip, she followed an interview with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. about Afghanistan with a YouTube recommendation: “Lucky’s Funeral,” in which a young girl earnestly gives her dead goldfish a toilet burial.
