Back in January, Tom Shales asked for a big hand for the news anchor he called “the little lady”—why, her ratings were up 5 percent.

Around the same time, the Los Angeles Times discovered that if, with a little help from Katie Couric’s PR department, you selectively cited an arbitrarily delimited time frame, you could make the case that Couric’s ratings were up seven percent.

As for Howard Kurtz, well, he traditionally just adds on an extra million viewers to whatever ratings Couric is getting at any given point.

Anyway, today, far from the PR madding crowd, Couric, the News Anchor Nobody Watches™, has been plugging along, riding that crest of positive coverage … and watching her ratings drop—week after week after week after week.

As we saw after Shales wrote his piece, Couric’s ratings had actually grown—not in the year-over-year case he and the CBS flacks were trying to make, but just week-to-week.

The only trouble with that scenario is that this was just after the election was over. It suggested that viewers came to Couric only when they didn’t need actual news any more.

And in any case, it meant merely that her ratings climbed back up to the miserable place she’d been a year previously—a bit over 7 million viewers.

Since then? Well, after the PR blitz from earlier this year, the TV audience got a chance to sample her wares again, and have not liked what they see. In March she dropped into the 6’s, and in April she dipped into the 5’s. Three weeks ago she dropped to 5.7 million viewers; two weeks ago she hit 5.6 million; and last week, according to ratings figures just released, she sank to 5.4 million.

The WSJ reported more than a year ago that CBS was talking about what to do with Couric after the inauguration. In fairness to Couric, it’s been months since then, and CBS hasn’t dumped her yet.

But when she’s dropping 100,000 to 200,000 viewers a week, how long can this last? Why are our intrepid national media critics suddenly silent on the subject of Katie Couric’s precipitous decline?

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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 

What struck me as weird about the Angels & Demons coverage was why certain circles of the press go nuts to declare this or that movie a flop, while giving others, like this one, a pass.

My theory is that Imagine, the Howard-Grazer production house, are masters at gaming the PR system, which is why Howard is always portrayed as the genteel overseer of A Beautiful Mind or Frost/Nixon, rather than the hackmeister of Ransom, The Mission and so forth.

Anyway, Pixar gets similar treatment—even when contrary evidence is right underneath the outlet’s nose. The WSJ today notes that Disney needs a hit from Pixar’s new Up.

Now, the story’s not rosily promotional. But consider this graf:

“Up” is unlikely to match the blockbuster box office success of last summer’s “Wall-E,” which took in more than $534 million world-wide. But the movie was a hit when it opened the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month and has been met with generally positive reviews before its release.

All that’s true. But: Wall-E’s worldwide take, while undoubtedly profitable for the studio, was a huge decline from Ratatouille’s, which was about $650M in equivalent dollars. So that emphasized phrase is terrible news for Disney—and worrisome for Pixar.

It’s all part of Pixar’s steep downward box office trend. The issue isn’t whether any Pixar movie will make money; the issue is how long Disney, which paid an awful lot of money for Pixar based on its muscular track record, will give free reign to an operation seemingly headed for 99-pound weakling status.

Making things worse: This recent NYT story, which the Journal reporter didn’t seem to have read, detailing the really scary part from Disney’s perspective: Pixar’s not making much money from toys any more, either. Cars did $3 billion in toy sales, the Times reported. The one about the rat and the one about the robot with all the fat people? Not so much.

Up, about a cranky 78-year-old and his rolly-polly sidekick, has limited toy potential as well.

Disney can handle a down period, right? No: The Journal says film revenues are off 97 percent last quarter. Pixar will buy itself some time, perhaps, with Toy Story 3; it will cost less than its predecessors but will sell some toys. But if Pixar can’t generate any more megahits, sooner or later some rough beasts from Robert Iger’s office are going to start slouching around, and not even Steve Jobs will be able to stop them from coming.

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Previously in Hitsville:

Is the Pixar brand fading?

Why are all the box office mavens giving Angels & Demons a pass? The film opened two weekends ago and came in at No. 1, barely beating Star Trek’s second week. Last weekend, it slipped to four (now behind Star Trek) with more than a 60 a 54 percent drop.

Box Office Mojo says the budget was $150M, which, given some of the likely profit-participation deals of Tom Hanks and Imagine (the Ron Howard-Brian Grazer production shingle), could be low. Distribution and marketing costs worldwide could total $70M more.

If Sony takes 55 percent of the box office receipts, that would mean the film would have to make $400M worldwide to break even. Since it’s at $300M already, that seems likely, and with significant DVD sales to come, the movie is going to make some money.

All that said, Angels & Demons is the biggest under-performer of the year thus far. The model for sequels, remember, is to far outpace the original. (See The Matrix Reloaded, Shrek 2, Pirates 2, Bourne Supremacy, National Treasure 2, The Mummy Returns, etc. etc. etc.)

The fact is that Howard and Hanks damaged the brand. The Da Vinci Code was one of the worst-reviewed major movies of all time—a 46 percent positive score on Metacritic, an incredible 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes’ “top critics” list. It was laughed off the screen at Cannes, and Variety called it “stodgy” and “grim.”

But no one asked Ron Howard or Tom Hanks about that on their chirpy PR campaigns last week. It was all ancient history.

Update: The film’s decline eased a little over the weekend, to 54 percent, still steep drop off. The weekend overviews, in the Times and in Variety, both noted the movie’s slip to fourth place without comment.

And in the end, what’s the highest it will gross domestically? $130M? Isn’t that a pathetic showing for an entry is one of the biggest franchises in the world? The new Night in the Museum will hit that sometime next week—and that film is yet another sequel that far outstripped its original at the box office.

I saw the thing yesterday and … it’s not bad, nowhere near as senselessly frenetic and ploddingly plotted. On the other hand, there remains evidence that no one involved was using their brains. One plot point, for example, is Hanks’ long-running desire to get into the Vatican archives. But it transpires in the film he’s able to read either Latin nor Italian.

And his character, of course, is a professor specializing in Vatican arcana. Harvard must have dropped its language requirements, another sign of the decline in American education. Little did the Vatican know that if it did let him in to the archives, he couldn’t have read anything anyway.

A short story in the NY Times says that Warner has refinanced itself with more than $1 billion in new bonds that won’t have to be paid back until 2016.

Here’s the interesting part:

Since the start of the year, shares of the Warner Music Group, the only publicly traded pure play on the recorded music business, have doubled, including a 23 percent gain just last week. Investors may be right in betting that the industry’s worst days are behind it, and that Warner is best positioned to capitalize, potentially by acquiring EMI.

Now, a 23 percent gain doesn’t mean much when the stock is trading at a fifth of what it was three years ago, and the “worst days” of the music business will remain a relative term. But it is interesting that the long-awaited EMI-Warner merger is back in the news:

The rejigged debt arrangements give Warner flexibility to do deals. And the timing of its coffer-filling exercise couldn’t be better. Its rival EMI is struggling under the $5 billion of debt borrowed by Terra Firma, the British private equity outfit run by Guy Hands, to take the company private.

In the past, EMI tried to buy Warner. But now the boot could be on the other foot. EMI, home of the Beatles and Beastie Boys oeuvre, is in no state to pounce. Moreover, its chief lender, Citigroup, would love to exit its position. When the two last talked, the potential synergies from a combination looked to be in the order of $250 million — which would carry a net present value of some $1.6 billion.

That’s reason enough for investors to begin their countdown to a Warner-EMI merger.

When last we checked in with blogger Nikki Finke, we discovered that, in her world, the phrase “toldja” was used even when she got stuff wrong. Now, Patrick Goldstein at the LA Times finds Finke at odds with reality once again.

Saturday, Finke posted most of a lengthy and tres dishy book proposal from Hollywood producer Jon Peters, using the word “exclusive” throughout.

The only trouble is, as Goldstein notes, that reporter Kim Masters, writing on the Daily Beast site, had it all a month ago.

The best part, from Masters’ post:

According to Peters, Walters invited him to her New York apartment to talk before he recorded an interview for a television special:

“Keeping things very chummy… she plied Jon with Champagne and caviar, then changed into ’something comfortable,’ leaving her bedroom door strategically ajar as she stripped down to her bra and panties, giving Jon a 20-20 view, as it were, of Barbara W. in all her glory. Whether Barbara was setting a trap to get the scoop of a lifetime, or whether she was making a sincere pass, Jon didn’t snap at the bait.”

Unlike Finke, Masters called Walters, who denied the incident ever happened. To me the Walters story seems too outre not to be true, but Masters, who co-wrote a book on Peters, notes that his past is studded with fanciful tales that others deny.

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Previously in Hitsville:

Is Nikki Finke mad as a hatter?
Crazy Nikki vs. the Journalist

A year ago, David “McNutty” Simon was being widely lionized for the concluding season of “The Wire”; only in certain remote outposts were criticisms of his rather unnuanced understanding of modern journalism heard.

But it doesn’t seem as if his reputation has aged well. Back then, Simon’s crayola scrawlings about his former profession were taken seriously; today, well, here’s a Gawker poster, Ryan Tate, tearing apart Simon’s heavily romanticized testimony on the state of the newspaper industry:

The Wire creator, David Simon, was a cops reporter a the Baltimore Sun for 12 years, ending in 1995. He then made a lucrative second career in fiction and Hollywood before detouring into a sideline as a cranky, reactionary media pundit this past year.

Simon told the Senate Commerce Committee today bloggers don’t go to city council meetings, or know what the hell is going on if they do — a clichéd, out of touch refrain common among newspapermen who can’t be bothered to do any reporting on the assertion.

The spot isn’t online right now, but Todd Rundgren has sold his classic hit “Hello It’s Me” to an antacid tablet commercial.

The song is one of the ineffable glories of its era, a mournful throwaway rag-picked from an early Nazz release and reimagined (for Something/Anything, Rundgren’s best album) as a jazz-pop classic, the glorious offspring of Carole King and Steely Dan.

It’s also about the little things, from the arresting bass triplet that starts the song to the insistent, keyboard-driven beat; from Rundgren’s gentle, unaffected vocals to a sax solo (which as I recall was done by one of the Brecker Bros.) as groovy as anything from the era.

Todd, you might say, is in the details.

Anyway, it’s now a commercial for Tums, and it’s going to be hard to hear it from now on without figuring it’s your acid reflux saying “Hello It’s Me.”

You gotta admit it makes a certain amount of sense, and I suppose Rundgren can make more money off the song by selling it to other treatments for digestive ailments (”When your diarrhea says ‘Hello it’s me,’ try Pepto Bismol!”).

Not to mention cold sores, acne or even herpes outbreaks.

I’ve been thinking about sellouts lately; a few weeks ago, a friend of mine, exasperated by my to-his-lights-doltish insistence on mocking such deals, wrote:

When a recording artist “sells out,” what has he sold? Can what he sold be resold? Is the sale permanent? Is it a bad metaphor? If the cliche didn’t exist, what would we call a recording artist who signed some sort of exclusive/promotional deal? Did Les Paul sell out to Gibson? etc. Is giving a label exclusive rights to sell your recordings “selling out”? Is endorsing a line of musical instruments or amps “selling out”?

To me, “selling out” is as good a metaphor as any, but it doesn’t have to be seen in that way. The issue comes up when artists embrace rock’s attitudinal posturings early in their career, and then turn around and sell the songs they made their reputation with to some TV ad.

Now, some stipulations: There’s a lot of crappy rock songs out there. And there’s rock that is as dishonest and cheesy as any commercial. But those posturings are real, and they put rock’s philosophical center of gravity some distance away from doing jingles to assist the branding objectives of a particular product of a large corporation.

(I don’t have a problem with a rock song about nausea, or diarrhea, or one that advises taking medication to take care of any problem; the issue is shilling for a product you don’t necessarily use—and that just as well might be bad for you or others.)

I’m not saying it’s fair: Rock and roll is a cruel mistress, and sometimes great artists end up financially out of luck. (The Moby Quotient, you will note, takes this into account.)

But: You don’t have to play the game if you don’t want to. So if you do, you deserve to get called on it when you sell your songs for an ad.

(There’s a tangential media issue, incidentally; there seems often to be a tacit agreement between journalists and sellouts not to ask about the commercials.)
So that’s the main point: If you buy into rock’s authenticity construct, you have to live by it.

What I don’t understand is what all of a suden we’re not allowed to even talk about this. Idolator, for example, mocked Hitsville when the Moby Quotient made its majestic first appearance in the pages of the Washington Post.

I attributed the phenomenon then, and still do, to the myrmidons of popism, who get fretful anytime you say anything that might make rock stars or their publicists unhappy.

But you could also put it this way: The extent you care about this in directly  related to whether, as a matter of first principles, you believe that rock and roll holds a special place in the pop-cultural firmament or that it doesn’t.

If you don’t, in a way you’ve excluded yourself in the discussion, because you don’t have anything at stake in it.

That said, you might consider whether there’s any line you will draw. Should Saul Bellow have done commercials? Should he have stuck in some paid product placement in his novels? (”Saul: Manischewitz wants in; can you have someone making matzoh?”)

Should David Foster Wallace have done Absolute ads, maybe, or done commercials for a hip new web site? (”When I’m looking up obscure information to pack into one of my signature orotund footnotes, I surf over to About.com!”)

Symphony orchestras are facing financial cutbacks; should Daniel Barenboim stop a Chicago Symphony concert (as I once saw Gary U.S. Bonds stop one of his shows) …  ask the audience what time it is … answer “Miller Time!,” pop open a bottle and take a swig … before continuing with the show?

In other words, you either believe in art as an activity separate from the crassly commercial or you don’t.

Again, there is no clear line: Rock isn’t a sound; it’s a state of mind, a big tent, a continuum. (”Rock is what you vote for,” Robert Christgau used to write on Pazz & Jop ballots.)

There was always pop music; rock came around about half-way through the last century and after a decade or so of experimentation coalesced around some core values.

One of those values was an understanding (I didn’t say rejection) of the idea of a line between art and commerce. Early on, in fact, the Rolling Stones did a Rice Krispies commercial; the Jefferson Airplane did a Levi’s ad. But there weren’t too many others.

There are many reasons most didn’t, but the main one was that rock traffics to some extent on authenticity; that the emotion and art conveyed through the music is genuine. Again, there’s a continuum: From Phil Ochs to David Bowie, from Patti Smith to Beck, artists have ranged between jut-jawed sincerity and disguised (even mocked) emotions.

Still, they haven’t shilled for crappy products. If the stigma to selling out didn’t exist, why has it been followed so closely by the vast majority of artists?