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CBS anchor Katie Couric went on the road to Philadelphia where she filed a couple of reports. Couric's first was serious: the combination of high malpractice insurance premiums for obstetricians and low reimbursement rates for Medicaid pregnancies means that delivering a baby in Philadelphia is a money-losing proposition. In the past decade, hospitals have shuttered 14 of the city's 42 maternity wards.
Couric's second feature was a lighthearted survey of Philly's famous sights and sounds. She reminded us of William Penn and Betsy Ross and Sylvester Stallone's Rocky and the Phillies' play-by-play announcer Harry Kalas and cheesesteak sandwiches and the Reading Terminal Market and Dick Clark's American Bandstand and the "greatest source of Philadelphia's pride" the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
What was peculiar about Couric's survey was how monochromatic it was. Her portrait of the city that brought us, for example, Bill Cosby and Ed Bradley and Teddy Pendergrass and Julius Erving and Joe Frazier, included just a single nod to African-Americans, a brief clip of The O'Jays' Love Train on the soundtrack.
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