Couric Pummeled As Newscast Ratings Continue To Slide

And while the newscast's structure has been pummeled, Ms. Couric has also endured exceptional personal scrutiny. She was criticized for wearing too much makeup or too little. Ms. Couric was caught up in an odd plagiarism incident, when an essay she had presented as her own -- even though written by a producer -- turned out to have been lifted from The Wall Street Journal.

She was criticized for being too soft in her initial newscasts, and too hard in an interview with the presidential candidate John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, after they revealed that Mrs. Edwards's cancer had returned. The issue was complicated by the public knowledge that Ms. Couric's husband, Jay Monahan, died from colon cancer in 1998.

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