Katie Couric Tackles America’s Toughest Issues on Nat Geo

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The level of anger thrumming through America like a persistent headache has left most people pondering what has happened to our country.  If you doubt the constancy of the rage and the news charting it, consider what happens when stuck at a meeting or on a plane without WiFi.  The moment you can reconnect, the immediate instinct is to scroll through headlines and then react -- yet those responses often reverberate in echo chambers.  With journalists all too often pinging from one story to the next, barely able to hit on the facts, it’s increasingly difficult to make sense of what is going on.  How does it all fit together? Why is this happening?  How did this come to be America today? Although journalists have traditionally taken a step back to try to figure out why events happen, on the National Geographic series America Inside Out with Katie CouricWednesdays, the former Today co-host and CBS News anchor instead takes a step forward.

Indeed, Couric takes thousands of steps as she traverses the country to get to the heart of issues plaguing America and tackles them in her usual forthright manner.  In the six-part documentary series she examines the fight over tearing down Confederate statues, being Muslim in America, the ever-growing reliance on tech and the mounting anxiety faced by working-class white people. This week’s installment is all about gender equality, and on May 16 the season finale with the disturbingly self-explanatory title explores The Age of Outrage.

The pilot, titled Re-Righting History, put into perspective the day neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville.  Couric was there early enough that her cameras caught prayer services and the tension as the situation built to a hideous crescendo.  As always Couric has a disarming way about her, and she doesn’t yell or get in people’s faces, but she’s never a lapdog. Rather, in the best journalistic tradition, she is a bulldog, which is proven in one scene.  A man asks if she is with the press; when she responds affirmatively, he tells her to step aside.  “I don’t have to step aside,” Couric says, evenly, as she keeps doing her job.

Jacqueline Cutler

Jacqueline Cutler is a longtime journalist covering television on a national and international level, after many hard news beats. She serves on the executive board of the Television Critics Association and currently writes the "Shattering the Glass Ceil… read more