The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric made a big splash last week recording its smallest audience for the network's evening news since 1987. It's not surprising. Since her debut eight months ago, Couric's ratings have been going down so fast she's getting the bends.
"Her broadcast needs time to catch on," Scott Pelley, who was on the short list for the evening news anchor job last year, told the newspapers last month. Patience, he urged.
It's turning out just the opposite. The more people see the show, the less they seem to like it.
What's wrong with the show?
I still remember the launch of the all-new, improved The CBS Evening News Without Dan Rather or Bob Schieffer. The hype was deafening. The network beats its chest and drums about the coup of luring Katie away from Today. CBS head honcho Les Moonves even bragged they were paying her $15 million a year. Understandable, with the high cost of hair spray and nannies for her children. Anyway, it's Sumner Redstone's money, what did he care.
The problem with a salary like that is that it leads to high expectations. This was compounded by CBS promoting her as the second coming of Edward R. Murrow. Were they kidding? She is no Edwina Murrow.
All-time low ratings have nothing to do with her being a woman but with a serious miscalculation.
Katie herself explained in the show's seventh month that the show is a work in progress, and she still "needed to get her sea legs."
Did it ever occur to Moonves and his jolly news executive team that is leading CBS Evening News to Davy Jones' Locker that their big catch is not an amphibian? She is better in the morning than evening? That she not only is in the wrong time zone, but that she had risen to her level of incompetence, which might some day be called The Katie Principle?
It's sad. They were trying to get the cult of personality stretched from morning to evening. The problem is they overlooked a few things.
In fairness to Katie, who I'm not a big fan of, she's no Golda Maier, but who is on the network news? She got the job because the network brainiacs thought she was somebody young people could relate too.
But she looks silly at night. She's afraid to smile. She's trying too hard to be serious. Her natural manner worked so well on the Today show. Now she is two-faced. At night we are seeing the other Katie. Some people don't like it, starting with me.
She's also become too political, too weird chasing her image, saying cutesy things
It hasn't helped that they attempted to bring in production elements from Today, like celebrity interviews. If people wanted celebrity interviews they can go to Entertainment Tonight, or Oprah or Regis and Kelly, and the four distinguished women on The View.
Why were they putting on Michael Fox talking about Parkinson's, as if that was news? It's been done. You basically have a 22-minute news hole. We don't need more celebrities with old news.
Then they added gimmicks, like 'phone-in and let us know what you think of the end of the show' and the vox populi, with that man-of-the-people Rush Limbaugh telling us the way he thinks it should have been.
Walter Cronkite never did that. He just said "And that's the way it is. It's over now, good night."
On the other hand, people overlook the CBS News division has totally imploded before she came in. She went to a third place news division that had been in third place for the last 100 years. They had already fired their number one famous newsperson, the president of the news division, all their top producers, all of their investigative staff. CBS News was in total chaos after the George Bush Flyboy debacle.
She walks into a news show that was third in the hearts of her countrymen, which was currently in third place, and in trouble. The crack news executives think if they put the right blazer on her somehow she's going to get all the ratings back. The level of expectation of executives was just stupid.
You would think some one in the room would have said that it doesn't matter what kind of blazer she has. "We've got a shitty news division. We're in third place for a reason."
And we are paying somebody $15 million who doesn't read all that well -- the basic job of the anchor - she is an interviewer!
"So we've taken somebody who doesn't do very well at the job that we are asking her to do and we're hoping the color of her blazer is going to pull us out of the ditch here. Does anybody in the room think this is going to be a problem? Whether we perch her on the edge of the desk or make her stand on her head, we've got a terrible news division-- that's the problem.'
Nobody seemed to bring that up. Now they're blaming her. Oh, she gets her share of credit, trying to pull it off as a cutesy newscaster. But it's all her fault, the geniuses at CBS are all whispering behind her back.
It's like seeing a picture of the Titanic. The front end is already under water. And they fly in a new captain. Probably not going to do that well. And that's how I read the situation.
Any day now Katie will be ending her show in the Dan Ratheresque courageous manner, "Patience."