In March 2000 the NBC morning show Today broadcast Katie Couric’s own colonoscopy as part of a colon cancer awareness campaign. Her husband, the TV legal analyst Jay Monahan, had died of colon cancer in 1998.
A study published in 2003 in the Archives of Internal Medicine measured the result. Colonoscopies per doctor per month rose from 15.0 to 18.1, and the higher rate held through the nine months the study covered. It became known as the “Couric effect.”