Modern PR campaigns are often constructed as intensely as a political race, and you can see a lot of the same techniques, notably the construction and manipulation of talking points that stress the angles that make the subject look good and deftly avoid the ones that don’t.

Whatever else can be said of Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™, she and her network have a PR department that doesn’t give up. They continue to generate an astonishing number of major stories about her, and even seem to have the NY Times and the Washington Post playing a kinky game of Couric-inspired one-upsmanship. Howard Kurtz was riding high for a while with a blizzard of upbeat, Katie-friendly missives, culminating entirely unnecessarily with a massive story for the Post in August that answered the journalistic question, “What did the fourth- or fifth-most-watched news anchor do during the Democratic convention?” The Times’ David Carr did his own piece on Couric last month.

(Hitsville’s comments on Kurtz are here and here.)

And now Friday, for no discerable reason, the Times weighs in again, retreading for the third time the news that Katie has a webcam, or something.

The subject is purportedly about how Couric, despite her lagging ratings on the CBS Evening News, is rebounding, helped along by her much-You-Tubed Sarah Palin interviews and a webcast she’s been doing. Indeed, “Couric rebounds with web and Palin” is the helpful headline. A few grafs into the story, Jacques Steinberg writes this:

In an interview this week in her CBS News office, Ms. Couric spoke of the satisfaction she has found in the fresh set of metrics that of late have collectively served as a reminder that she and her program still matter.

The problem is that we never hear what those metrics are*.

… but Couric is satisfied, so they must be good!

But if they are so good… why don’t we get to hear what they are? The status of her broadcast ratings are never detailed… and we never hear how many people actually watch her newfangled webcast.

And the story contains an awful lot of passages like this:

And yet Ms. Couric and Mr. Kaplan have done much to make their own luck. For months they have been giving over an increasing portion of the “CBS Evening News” to political coverage.

Emphasis added, here and throughout. Do they really get credit for thinking that up? Couldn’t, you know, a hamster that didn’t get paid $15 million, sucking up a hobbled network’s resources, have made that call?

Here’s another one:

Those features also served to introduce many of the show’s producers to the senior advisers of the various campaigns. In the case of the McCain campaign, those contacts were further solidified in July when Ms. Couric and Mr. Kaplan sought to provide a counterbalance to an interview she did in Jordan with Senator Barack Obama, his first with a network anchor during a highly publicized international tour. By satellite from the Middle East, Ms. Couric conducted a separate interview with Mr. McCain that was then shown on the same broadcast.

It was a gesture the McCain campaign would remember…

Giving Couric and her production team credit for having contacts with political campaigns is what President Bush would call the soft bigotry of low expectations. What’s next? “Upon taking the job, Couric leaped into action, immediately sending out change-of-address notices and ensuring that her news operation was on the email lists of the major figures vying for the presidency.”

And of course, CBS did the McCain interview because there was criticism from the right that the network news anchors were all following Obama’s European tour like a bunch of Rolling Stones groupies.

But such PR-heavy material doesn’t just demand that you take the subjects on their own terms. You also have to not ask them the hard questions.

If you were interviewing Katie Couric, wouldn’t you ask her a) What she thought of Sarah Palin; b) What the fallout from the McCain campaign had been (If nothing else, they must have had something to say about CBS’s having spread the agony out over a week); c) What her plan was to revive her newscast’s stagnant ratings; d)  … and those are the ones I thought of off the top of my head. None was broached in the story.

The prospect of her leaving the position, which the WSJ said was being discussed back in April, is brought up only tangentially, and the Journal wasn’t given credit for the scoop. In this way, too, the Times was following Howard Kurtz. He didn’t give the Journal credit either.

* Ironically, Couric had been improving in the ratings, hitting almost six million viewers even before her Palin bump from the doldrums in the low five millions she’d been in. But it was still lower than where she’d been the year before. Too bad there hasn’t been much big news around to boost the ratings!