Critics are bashing Katie Couric for asking California Gov. Gavin Newsom if he is too “good-looking” during a sit-down interview on her podcast.
“Do you have a ‘Zoolander’ problem?” Couric asked the Dem during an episode of her podcast “Next Question,” referring to the 2001 Ben Stiller movie about male models.
The pair laughed and Newsom, who’s considered a likely presidential candidate, pursed his lips in an apparent attempt to imitate Stiller’s “Blue Steel” modeling face.
“Are you just ridiculously good-looking, as Vogue said? No, seriously, what do you do about that?” Couric asked.
Newsom took the question in earnest, answering that he didn’t want to get a stylist like other politicians to “become someone they’re not.”
“You don’t do anything about it because if you’re gonna do something about it, then you’re bulls–ting people. You know what, I am who I am, and it’s fine,” Newsom said.
“You don’t have to like me, or maybe you like a slick person, I don’t know. Whatever, it’s okay.”
Social media users were quick to ridicule Couric’s line of questioning as “embarrassing,” sarcastically calling the podcast clip an example of “hard-hitting journalism.”
I’m 100% sure she would ask the same of @JDVance, naturally, of course https://t.co/StLVCweMWP
“I’m 100% sure she would ask the same of @JDVance, naturally, of course,” podcast host Megyn Kelly wrote in a post on X.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha scoffed: “Katie has the audacity to lecture people on what real journalism is.”
Podcast host Adam Carolla took aim at Newsom’s answer to the question, writing: “Close your eyes and picture Hunter Biden. They are the same guy. Confident, tone deaf and dumb.”
Couric’s fawning question was a nod to a glowing Vogue profile on Newsom last month that called the 58-year-old governor “embarrassingly handsome.”
“Let’s get this out of the way: He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address,” the first line of the cringeworthy article reads.
Later in the story, the reporter acknowledged there were topics she didn’t discuss with the governor – including “the LA wildfires, contraction and corporate consolidation in Hollywood, homelessness, the coming AI apocalypse, to name a few.”
While Couric took heat for the softball question about Newsom’s looks, she grilled the governor on poverty and education issues in California later on in the episode.
“The highest poverty rate, tied with Louisiana; the highest unemployment; and as Nick Kristof of the New York Times recently wrote, Mississippi schools outperform California schools, especially for poor kids,” she said.
“Now people see that or hear that or read that and they’re like, ‘No thanks, California. No thanks, Gavin Newsom. We’re good,’” the host added.
The pol responded with a lengthy defense of the state’s track record on poverty.
“Our poverty rate’s about average. And we’re right up there with Florida, Louisiana and others with the supplemental poverty rate, which has been the case for 40 years,” he said.
“And the original sin there is housing, which has been a problem in California since Ronald Reagan left office as governor. And we simply have a supply-demand imbalance.”
