We Want Media

Gravitas: It's one of those journalistically ambiguous words, like blogging or "spin," and people seem to have a hard time explaining what it is. They can only tell when people don't have it. Anchormen Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw have it, while others, like Katie Couric, don't. In fact, Connie Chung's lack of gravitas pretty much got her dropped from co-anchoring the "Evening News."

NYO's Rebecca Dana writes that gravitas is simply "male posturing." And she's right.

You know who else had it? Ron Burgundy of "Anchorman" fame. Now that's gravitas for you. And as hilarious as a concept as it is, it's something that needs to be dropped from the journalistic vocabulary. Hell, the world of journalism even.

See, gravitas is just a caricature, a remnant from the olden days of journalism when people didn't trust women to give them their news. It's a concept that, frankly, makes all newspeople look like sexist jackasses, and it needs to be dropped. No matter how cool Ron Burgundy, Champ Kind, Brian Fantana, and Brick Tamland were. And they were pretty damn cool.