Posted on 07/09/2007 4:48:33 AM PDT by abb
From outside the sleek glass chamber of the CBS Evening News set, you can see her: alone in a prim black pantsuit and pearls, shuffling a stack of papers at the wide, half-moon desk. Sitting stiff and still, she looks dwarfed under the stage lights and high studio ceilings, the cameras barely visible in the shadows.
“Hello, everyone,” Katie Couric says into the camera, mouth turned down, eyes narrowed seriously.
She introduces the lead story of the day, and a news segment rolls while she sits and waits at the desk. When it ends, the camera returns. She peers gravely into the lens and introduces another story. It rolls, and Couric sits. She waits. The program fades to a pharmaceutical commercial, and Couric shuffles the papers and studiously examines her notes for the camera.
Twenty minutes later, it’s over.
And so it goes every night: same stoic gaze, same sober lead-ins from a TelePrompTer, the effervescent personality of America’s Sweetheart nowhere to be seen. It’s not exactly what Couric signed on for last year, when, with extraordinary fanfare, she became the first solo woman anchor on an evening newscast. CBS chief Leslie Moonves had lured her with the promise of “blowing up” the formulaic evening-news format, offering her a show that would be an incubator for her own ideas.
In the early, heady days after her arrival, the news had a chatty, friendly vibe and a bright, casual atmosphere never seen before at 6:30 p.m. There were fewer headlines, more news features, and off-the-cuff reactions from Couric. On her first broadcast, she conducted a sit-down interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about the state of the war on terror, asking him, “Are we safer now?” She introduced a segment of her own invention called “freeSpeech” that was supposed to foster public discourse by allowing celebrities and other guests to sound off on a topic of their choosing. She showed baby pictures of Suri Cruise (“Yessiree, she does exist!”). And at the end, as she signed off, she casually leaned against the news desk—a pose that, when the camera pulled back, revealed Couric’s famous legs. It might not have been revolutionary television, but it was a definite change from what Couric once derided as “newzak.” More than that, it was unmistakably Katie. A slightly more serious, more polished version of her morning-show persona, but Katie nonetheless.
Thirteen and a half million viewers tuned in to see her first broadcast. But it was only a matter of weeks before the numbers started dropping, first to pre-Couric levels, then even lower. By May, the ratings bottomed out at 5.5 million a night, the lowest in two decades. A distant third behind ABC’s Charles Gibson and NBC’s Brian Williams, Couric is, for the first time in her storied career, losing.
She and CBS are now taking a long, hard look at what went wrong. “I think the one thing that I realized, looking back at it and analyzing it, is people are very unforgiving and very resistant to change,” says Couric. “The biggest mistake we made is we tried new things.”
Which is why she is now sitting somberly behind the desk at CBS, shuffling papers and doing her best impersonation of a traditional news anchor. Her original show has been scrapped. Even her informal greeting, “Hi, everyone,” was buttoned up to a more formal “Hello.”
Would she have taken the job if she had known it would turn out this way? Couric hesitates. If Moonves had offered her the job she’s doing today, she admits, she would have thought twice about it. “It would have been less appealing to me,” she says. “It would have required a lot more thought.”
At Sarabeth’s restaurant on Central Park South one morning last month, Couric glides through the crowd at the door like she’s working the rope line at the Today show. She amiably chats up the family at a nearby table before playing a quick game of musical chairs to find just the right seat (facing away from the window) and ordering an omelette and coffee. Her face is preternaturally youthful at 50, nose pink after a weekend in the sun, lashy blue eyes dialing up the winsome smile by a few thousand watts. She doesn’t look like a woman embattled.
“I think that bugs people even more,” she says, “that I’m not a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s probably disappointing to some people. Because in the arc of the story, that’s what they want to see.”
snip
It is the customers (viewers) fault. Typical.
The Six Steps In Any Project
1) Unbounded enthusiasm
2) Total disillusionment
3) PANIC!!
4) Frantic search for the guilty
5) Punishment of the innocent
6) Promotion of the uninvolved
I think Couric is still in living in step 4, right now the viewers are guilty for her failure.
Bull-looney
She should have insisted on an hour and brought her morning set to evening. Spruced it up with dinner instead of breakfast and just sat there on her couch doing the same thing she’d always done.
I’ve never seen Couric on the Today Show or on the CBS Evening News. I think the only place I’ve seen her is on the cover of Charen’s book, Useful Idiots, and articles like this where people are wondering why she’s such a loser.
She whines that people don’t want change. That’s not true. People want change from liberal, biased reporting, which they didn’t get from her. I’ll be happy to see CBS Evening News die. I get most of my news from the internet, anyway. Now that there are alternatives, “journalists” like her are on the way out.
CBS should give Katie:
1. A lifetime contract.
2. Double her salary
3. Big bonuses not based on share of audience.
4. Sign up Rosie to do a five minute closing bashing GW, America, Christians and praising her idols, the al Qaeda Serial killers.
Go Katie! You are doing a great job for our side!
The only way to salvaged her spot on CBS News would be to put her on with an older conservative white guy -- like Bill Bennett.
Katie's too much like the "not so special" single woman at a couples dinner... pair her with a conservative man and the ratings would skyrocket.
It seems that yours is the only post so far that shows a touch of empathy for Katie. I do know that the strangled hold of the left on the television media, has driven some of us to muttered and violent expletives.
For some strange reason (maybe the colonoscopy business), I cannot join a cheering section on her obvious professional trauma. While having absolutely no brief for what these people have done in turning television into propaganda machine, I hope she does not completely blow it.
Better an older, sadder and wiser person, that could try to regain "the common touch"- if she ever had that.
Sinking ship cartoon is dead on. If anyone expected that simply replacing Rather-clueless with Perky Katie was going to keep a sinking See-BS wreck afloat, then they were just delusional.
Me too - - too cruel .
Couric has a sweetness that "feels" of a sheltered privileged life - not the sweetness that comes from a deep and sad awareness of the human condition. It makes her come across as superficial. This experience with CBS News will take the edge off her charm - and off the feeling of shallowness.
She'll grow, but it's a high price. CBS need to pair Couric with the conservative white guy - it'll play to her natural strengths. And it'll open up the show to the 50% of the population that's not liberal...
Replacing one flavor of lefty spin with another is hardly a blow-up.
Wrong person in the wrong job.
No Katie, what we WANT to see is real news reported fairly. What we DON'T WANT to see is you reading a teleprompter pretending to be a journalist, which you are not.
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/
“Opening Salvo In Katie’s Campaign To Ease Herself Out Of The Anchor Chair”
Some important reader responses to the New York profile of Katie Couric:
> “The truly interesting thing about the NY Magazine story is that it seems to be the opening salvo in Katie’s campaign to ease herself out of the anchor chair and into whatever her next job might be. Why else would she authorize Nicolla Hewitt to say that the news division was behind Couric the way they should have been?”
> “You missed the lead of the NY Mag piece. Here’s the key sentence, uttered by the news division president!! Hello? Katie’s boss admits her skills don’t work at 6:30pm. Game over. Might as well get the office ready at 60 Minutes. Key quote: ‘Even McManus admits that Couric’s morning-show skills simply didn’t fit into the evening news: ‘A lot of things that made Katie successful in the morning probably don’t work in the evening news broadcast.’’ “
> “In the New York piece on Katie Couric, she manages, in just the first page, to insult the public not once but twice. In addressing her dismal ratings, she notes ‘...people are very unforgiving and very resistant to change.’ She goes on to say ‘I think it bugs people even more that I am not a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown.’ It is apparent she harbors a degree of disdain for the viewing public. It is therefore not surprising it is reciprocated.”
> “Has anyone found it interesting that since Mid-May Katie Couric has been “off” or on “assignment” during 10-15 broadcasts, with either Harry Smith or Russ Mitchell filling in most often?”
Posted by brian | 01:28 PM | Couric Watch | Email this post
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/
If Couric Moves To 60 Minutes... Who Becomes The New Leader Of CBS News?
Theoretically, of course: Amid all the talk about Katie Couric’s future, an e-mailer asks: “Let’s work with the assumption that Couric transitions off ‘Evening News’ after the ‘08 elections, becoming the CBS News equivalent of Bill Cosby, who came in and helped reshape CBS entertainment’s primetime. Who becomes the news divisions Ray Romano: The sleeper who’s out there on the air now, but emerges as the leader, and helps push the news division to the top, like Romano pushed CBS’s primetime to dominance?
Russ Mitchell? Harry Smith? Scott Pelley? Lara Logan? Tracy Smith? Who will emerge in the next two years as the new leader?”
Send your feedback to tvnewser@mediabistro.com...
“Very long article about how Katie will Endure no matter what...”
To Katie, I say “stay the course!”.
And do for CBS News what a band of loser talk-radio-show “hosts”
have done to Air America!
I agree. She's doing the Lord's Work at CBS - putting them out of business.
I’m going to go out on a limb here. After the 08 elections and they put Katie out to pasture, CBS may very well pull the plug on the CBS Evening News.
You heard it here first.
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“The Return Of The Less Than Incredible Shrinking Woman”
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