Variety’s Brian Lowry has a short but powerful look at the predicament CBS is in. It’s typically clear-headed piece from by far the most penetrating observer of the industry writing today:

The only real tragedy in all this, frankly, would be if anyone drew too many conclusions about Couric’s predicament based on her gender. The move-and-flop pattern hardly discriminates by sex, as evidenced by former “Today” colleague Bryant Gumbel’s stumbling leap to CBS a decade ago as host of the short-lived “Public Eye.”

Lowry’s sympathetic to Couric but notes what happens next isn’t going to be pretty, when

there’s no longer the luxury of conducting the descent, when the time comes, under the shroud of darkness.

I think, in fact, he’s *too* sympathetic. I took the time to watch Katie Couric announce she was leaving the “Today” show fourteen or fifteen months ago. Here’s what I heard: The first thing mentioned was Brian Doyle, a Homeland Security official who was busted for being a sexual predator online. Then came this, which I quote in its entirety:

COURIC: And welcome to “Today” on this Wednesday morning, everyone. I’m Katie Couric.

LAUER: And I’m Matt Lauer. Clearly, it’s a big embarrassment for the Department of Homeland Security. This agency is–is designed and supposed to keep us all safe and now their deputy press secretary is in some serious trouble.

COURIC: That’s right, Matt. Authorities arrested 55-year-old Brian Doyle on Tuesday evening and charged him with using a computer to try to seduce what he believed was a 14-year-old girl. It turns out, though, it was an undercover detective. We’ll have much more on that story just ahead.

We’ll also show you the dramatic congressional testimony from 19-year-old Justin Berry, the teenager we first talked to on Tuesday. He told Congress how he was victimized on online by more than 1,000 men. Now he’s angry that so little has been done about it. Matt:

LAUER: Katie, also ahead we’re going to have some crucial advice for women who are going to a bar or a party where drinks will be served. We’re going to go undercover to show you just how easy it was for our security expert to slip something into the drinks of some unsuspecting women.

Child porn… child porn… and mickeys! At 7 a.m.! It was a quick reminder that the real debate about Couric wasn’t that she’s a woman, that she’s a blonde, or that she shrieked at the help. It’s that she was the public face of a skanky network infotainment franchise.

The machinations the broadcast news organizations are going through right now are I think hugely overcovered in the national press; No one under 60 watches broadcast news, and it’s hard to see not only how the CBS News division has that much of its storied assets to protect at this point, but what options are open to it in the current media world. But there should be no question of the sort of newsperson Couric wasn’t when she took the job.