With Katie Couric, the News Anchor Nobody Watches™, fearful of losing her job and Les Moonves, aka Mr. Julie Chen, fearful of having to admit he made a grievous error by shelling out some $15 million a year on a celebrity instead of the 100 or so actual journalists he could have hired in her stead, CBS embarked on a Couricapalooza of a PR campaign to salvage the Chipper One’s job.

It was extremely successful, with agreeable tongue-baths in the LA Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times, provided by such stalwarts as Howard Kurtz, Tom Shales and Jacques Steinberg.

Each of these worthies is entitled to his own opinion as to Couric’s competence (or rightfulness) as an anchor, of course; but all went above and beyond, carefully dishing out the Couric-friendly ratings details CBS supplied them, and not spending too much time putting those numbers into context or looking at bigger trends.

(And none spoiled the game by pointing out what was even more obvious, that each of their exclusive interviews was part of an orchestrated PR onslaught.)

Anyway, having exhausted all takers on the national level, the Couric PR myrmidons are now doling out press availabilities to even less credulous local news outlets. Couric turned up recently in both the NY Post and the NY Daily News, both of which agreeably repeated the organization’s Couric-friendly talking points and didn’t focus too awfully much on the bad ratings news.

Check out what the Post ran with:

Two years after leaving NBC’s “Today” to anchor the “CBS Evening News,” Katie Couric can finally gloat about her ratings — but she’s not going to. Couric, who’s taken her hits and repeatedly placed third nationally in the evening news race behind ABC and NBC, has beaten NBC’s “Nightly News” in the big New York market for the past six months — and last month logged a 22 percent increase in overall viewers. But Couric refuses to take credit. “It’s all due to the staff, the correspondents and producer Rick Kaplan,” she told us. “It takes a while for anything to click and for people to get used to me.”

That’s impressive—isn’t NBC by far the ratings leader? That seemed strange to me; I did some research and discovered (on Media Bistro) something I didn’t know—that the ABC Evening News kicks everyone’s ass in NYC. In the New York media market, at least, Charles Gibson has more viewers than Couric and Brian Williams combined. Who knew?

(Note how Page Six doesn’t mention that Couric’s big Williams kill is just for the second-place prize.)

The NY Daily News piece is just as fluffy, with each bit of bad news carefully balanced by someting positive:

With two years under her belt at CBS, the “CBS Evening News” still trails NBC and ABC in the national ratings, but Couric seems to have won over some of her loudest detractors.

Though Couric recognizes she’s had a bumpy adjustment period, she says she doesn’t live and die by the numbers.

What’s interesting in both cases is that all the talk that powered the national pieces—about those improved ratings—is gone.

(As I noted at the time, while there had been some improvement in her shows’s perennially bottom-basement standings, this had come at the end of last year, only after the presidential race had concluded, suggesting that, for many people, CBS and Couric was a place to turn to only when the real news was over.)

Now, to go back to the Post and the Daily News, when you’re practicing PR, and not journalism, not saying anything doesn’t mean there’s no news.

It means there’s bad news.

That’s why neither the Daily News nor the Post took a look at the most recent CBS ratings. Just a few weeks ago Tom Shales was telling us that Couric’s numbers were up five percent. This was in that heady period immediately after the inauguration when, again, folks had started drifting back to Couric.

I couldn’t quite figure out where that five percent figure had come from, but here’s the situation now:  The CBS Evening News is attracting just north of 6 million people, a hefty 20 percent decline from that post-inaguration high Shales was crowing about, demonstrating again that Couric can’t hold on to an audience.

The last two weeks have been disrupted, TV Neswer says, by the college basketball finals, but the trend downwards by CBS has been ineluctable for eight weeks, and has lost the network more than a million viewers in the process.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Couric Watch: Ratings plummet!
Paging Katie Couric!
Dear Tom Shales
Katie Couric—Where America Turns When the News Is Over™
Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™
Couric and CBS, lying
Should CBS jettison its news division?
Katie Couric’s ratings hit a new low
Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later