<i>London Calling</i>: CBS' McManus is No Arledge

At what stage does Sean McManus, president of CBS News, start carrying the can for the Katie Couric mess?

The critics are happy to snipe at Couric, but she's not the one who decided to spend $16 million of a shrinking annual news budget on a morning news host who lacked a hard news pedigree. She just took the money.

She's not the one with whom the buck finally stops, over decisions like handing over the CBS Evening News, ninety seconds at a time, to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and calling the segment Free Speech.

When Sean McManus was named president of CBS News in 2005, the comparisons to the late Roone Arledge of ABC were inevitable. Like Arledge, McManus had presided over his network's sports division before being handed the keys to news. He even started his career at ABC, under Arledge.

But unfortunately for CBS, that's where the similarities end.

Arledge was an innovator, a visionary. He pioneered the use of slow motion in sports coverage and somehow managed to make barrel jumping on ice into compelling TV. Arledge had a flair for turning television coverage into an event (see: Monday Night Football), and a knack for choosing the best people to cover that event (see: Cosell/Meredith).

When Arledge moved to news, he invented the multi-city (Washington, Chicago, London), multiple anchor (Reynolds, Jennings, Robinson) evening news format. He not only established Nightline as a broadcast institution, he also understood that Ted Koppel was the right man for the job.

Arledge's vision is what turned ABC News around and made it number one.

There is nothing in Sean McManus' record to suggest he is a visonary of any kind. His success at CBS Sports was built not on innovation, but on reacquiring broadcast rights to NFL games, which the network had previously lost.

And what kind of vision has he brought to CBS News?

Well, apart from Couric, one of his first moves was to make a former model with a penchant for flashing her girlish charms at lovesick soldiers in Afghanistan CBS' new chief foreign correspondent.

"Some people just jump off the screen and have star value," Mr. McManus told the New York Times. "Lara Logan falls in that category."

Lara Logan is a tenacious reporter whose courage is beyond question. She goes to dangerous places and she puts it on the line.

And it could well be that when other war zone reporters complain that Logan "exploits her God-given advantages with a skill that Mata Hari might envy", they are simply serving up sour grapes.

But the job of a chief foreign correspondent, at the network of Ed Murrow, should be about more than "star value". There's a certain weight that comes with the title, a certain analytical requirement.

Lara Logan, despite the bravery and those big, brown eyes is just not there yet. That's not her fault, because few 35 year olds are. (Murrow, who was 31 when he started covering WW2, was exceptional in that respect).

Again, you can't really blame Logan for taking the title, nor the money that comes with it. But you certainly can blame McManus for offering those things up.

The same way he gambled that the perky ("Hi everyone!") but not quite credible Katie Couric could prove herself in Walter Cronkite's chair, he decided the rather fetching Lara Logan should be the face of the network's overseas news operation.

So, eighteen months into Sean McManus' tenure, what has CBS got to show for the appointment?

A evening news anchor who can't fill Bob Schieffer's boots, let alone Cronkite's.

A chief foreign correspondent who gets compared to Mata Hari, rather than Murrow.

And a president who is proving himself to be no Arledge.