from nytimes.com
Is the CBS Evening News tanking because Katie Couric is a woman? Or is it tanking because Couric sucks? The NYT's Bill Carter wonders, letting CBS vote for the former and Couric critics go with the latter. After a ratings slide to 6.05 million — certainly a lot of people, but a solid 3 mil less than both Brian Williams at NBC and current pack-leader Charlie Gibson at ABC — it's clear that her newscast is in decline. Before wondering how to fix it — that's where Rick Kaplan comes in — Carter takes a moment to wonder who's at fault. Sadly, he forgets the third culprit: CBS News itself.
Before getting there, a note on Couric: Alas, she has fallen way short of the vast potential she brought to the spot. Couric, best known for her wide smile and fresh audience connection every morning on The Today Show, ceded her authenticity completely when she took over the 6:30 pm slot. Her tones were suddenly modulated, muted; her face carefully arranged in an expression of news-appropriate gravitas. Yeah, I said gravitas. Ironically, the efforts to maintain her sunny Today Show persona were adopted externally with hokey greetings and sign-offs ("Hi, everyone!" "That's a page from my notebook!") but, absent any matching affect, they just lent even more awkwardness to a presentation that has just felt wrong.
But anchor and managing editor though she may be, the CBS newscast is a team effort — which means that someone must have flashed her the thumbs-up and told her she was doing great. And someone must have said, "Gee, Free Speech is an awesome idea!" (Presumably that someone was Rome Hartman, who was nixed in favor of Kaplan, but that's not entirely the point). CBS News chief Sean McManus makes a smart point in the article that is worth citing:
Mr. McManus defends the choices CBS made. After years of hearing how the evening news was a dying institution, if the network had not tried to shake things up, he said, "the industry would have said: why did you hire Katie Couric and put on the exact same newscast?"
And that's true — except they put on a different newscast with the exact same ethos. "Free Speech" gets a lot of flak but it's not because it wasn't a cool idea — it was 90 free seconds every day that could have been filled up with with something amazing. However, for the most part, CBS News chose to fill it up with people who were already being heard saying things that were already being said: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama, Bob Schieffer (and yes, our own Arianna Huffington). We also know from Bill Maher's experience that the topic wasn't necessarily free.
On a personal note, I know from my own experience talking to them about a possible slot back in September that there were restrictions on what they wanted to discuss; specifically, the topic had to be something that the audience ("average age 59") would understand. My initial pitches on the role of humor in media and politics (Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert/The Onion) were deemed "too hip"; after a back-and-forth wherein I pitched other ideas, including the representation of women in media, somehow it evolved into me being invited to speak about reproductive rights. Not that I don't love my uterus, but I declined; I figured CBS could get an actual expert on that subject, if they wanted.*
This seemed to me a small window into what they were — or rather, weren't — looking for in "Free Speech" segments; pandering to a 59-year-old-demo with what you think they already know usually doesn't provide much room for much that's new and innovative. It suggested a mindset that was deathly afraid of scaring anyone away. Well, we all know how that turned out.
Despite big changes to the broadcast — the new set, the new look, and of course the new anchor — the new CBS Evening News has ultimately been about being calculated and careful, and the best example of that is Couric herself — so natural and sympathetic on Today, so restrained and neutral at CBS, which has seemed so counter-intuitive to what we know about her (her tough-talkin' interview of John and Elizabeth Edwards is a good example of her seeming almost to go in the complete opposite direction of what you'd assume her instincts to have been - Today Show Katie would have been a lot warmer, which might have made the tough questions seem less harsh and out of place). In any case, it's not just Couric, and it's not just because she's a woman (which explains the hyper-scrutiny, but not what they're putting out there to be scrutinized). It's the fact that CBS News — as a whole — has screwed this up in the execution. Too late to change it? Of course not — it hasn't even been a year. But it is too late to blame it on anyone else. The good news is that they now have every excuse to really shake things up — if they have the guts to do it, Katie Couric may still surprise us all.
Is It the Woman Thing, or Is It Katie Couric? [NYT]
*NB: I did not mention this at the time because there was still the expectation that we'd come up with a mutually-acceptable idea, and also, I had suggested a few names of women to talk about reproductive rights and I wanted to give CBS time to make good on following up on that; the segment was killed only a few weeks after.
