This research examines the life and career of Katie Couric as a woman of prominence who is at the peak of her career. The plan of the research will be to set forth the course of her rise to the pinnacle of her life's work, and then to discuss evidence of her being socialized to succeed, as against evidence of exploitation or compromise of her ambitions. Influences on her life, including role models, will also be discussed.
Although as a cohost of the Today Show Katie Couric has one of the most recognized faces in the United States, her celebrity status was not the result of a protracted and difficult rise to fame. According to published reports, Couric was born Katherine Anne Couric in 1957 and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979; her degree was in American Studies. After graduation, her father, a journalist and public relations worker, advised her to seek employment in the television industry (Marin, Chang, & Angell, 1998). She worked as a so-called desk assistant at ABC News in Washington, obtaining the job partly on the strength of what is widely reported to be a winning personality (Bumiller, 1996). However, professional capability appears to have been a factor of an almost uninterrupted career rise; she has been called an accomplished reporter (Flander, 1992). In 1980, she obtained a position as an assistant on the news-assignment desk of the newly formed Cable News Network (CNN). and after only a few weeks on the job she was thrust before the camera to read the 6:00 a.m. news when a news anchor failed to show up for work. The impromptu debut is widely regarded as having been a disaster; Reese Schonfeld, a cofounder of CNN, was watching the broadcast and insisted that Couric never be allowed in front of the camera (Bumiller, 1996).
The initial on-camera debacle did not prevent Couric from being transferred to CNN in Atlanta as an associate producer and then as producer of a two-hour news and information program...