What’s important about the internet to me is how it can undercut and challenge the calcified and celebrity-struck MSN.

Oh, wait:

[H]ere’s why the CBS Evening News is struggling in the ratings, how it can turn things around…and why none of it is Katie Couric’s fault.

That’s not the latest love letter to Katie Couric from Tom Shales or Howard Kurtz (or the LAT’s Matea Gold, or the NYT’s Jacques Steinberg …); that’s from Mediaite, the just-launched site that wants to give us the no-holds-barred, behind-the-scenes scoop on the media!

The title to that article is “The Current State of the CBS Evening News: Don’t Blame Katie.” After a no-doubt dogged series of interviews, the writer, Steve Krakauer, as the excerpt above indicates, set out to tell us what’s really wrong in what used to be called the Tiffany Network, before MTV bought it.

Now, as I read it, Krakauer after that big setup has exactly two reasons Couric is not to blame.

I know this because they are labeled “#1″ and #2.”

The first is “Politics.” The network, he says, is viewed as liberal.

Krakauer is referring to the image of the network when Dan Rather was the anchor. Funny thing. Times have changed and now, as you might have heard, NBC is the liberal network. The CBS image may no doubt linger, particularly among the senior-skewing evening news audience. But it has doubtless eased in recent years, particularly with the adoption of senior-friendly Katie Couric as anchor.

The other prong of his argument is that CBS’s audience is redder than the other networks. He cites a Time story on The Mentalist that makes the argument that CBS has “a lock” on throwback entertainment designed for the more traditional TV audience.

James Poniewozik is a strong analyst of TV, of course, but you could make the argument that he was, in effect, making the argument for The Mentalist. The hydra-headed amped-up CSI franchise on CBS is the opposite of everything The Mentalist is supposed to be. So is Survivor. So is Big Brother. So is The Big Bang Theory.

In other words, Krakauer’s argument a) isn’t true and b) to the extent it might be was supposed to have been eased by Couric.

Krakauer’s second argument (”Lead-in”) for Couric is that she has poor lead-ins from some CBS affiliates in LA and Chicago. Well, fine. She has some weak lead-ins from affiliates. But does that explain why her ratings have been dropping?

Here’s the case against Couric, none of which Krakauer acknowledges:

1) Her background is not substantive enough to be a network TV anchor. 2) Her experience is in the realm of infotainment*. 3) After that burst of publicity on her ascendance to the position, her ratings quickly dropped, and have consistently been far below that of her predecessor, Bob Shieffer. 4) The audience checked her out and decided it didn’t like her. 5) Her one big ratings bounce up came … after the last election, suggesting that America viewed her as a comforting lap to sit on when there wasn’t any real news out there. 6) Then they went down again. 7) Then they went down some more, to the point where she is now breaking her own record of the lowest ratings ever for the newscast. 8 ) For her reported $15 million salary, the network could hire 100 reporters and producers to, you know, report the news. 9) Instead of productively working to deal with these issues, she’s embarked on a long-running PR campaign, which, having exhausted all other venues, has now dripped down to internet startups looking for a little celebrity juice.

When, as seems inevitable, Couric gets dumped by CBS, shouldn’t Mediaite want to be ahead of that curve, rather than behind it with the likes of Howard Kurtz?

————–

* In an early post on Couric, I detailed some of the creepy stuff she did on the Today Show and referred to her, justifiably, as “the public face of a skanky network infotainment franchise.” More recently, I referred to her as a “skanky infotainment specialist“; a friend, offended, pointed out that I used the word to describe her. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s a fair comment; I shouldn’t call Couric herself “skanky.”

————

Previously in Hitsville:

Couric’s ratings: It gets worse
Confidential to Tom Shales and Howard Kurtz: Katie Couric’s ratings are in the tank again!
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 

Katie Couric was off last week, so on one level it’s not fair to blame her for the fact that the CBS flagship newscast lost ten percent of its viewership last week, knocking it down below 4.9 million viewers, or half a million fewer than its all-time historical low.

On the other hand, Couric had already brought it down to that historic low the last two weeks.

Hitsville’s beef, remember, isn’t with Couric, though, as a skanky infotainment specialist she is about as qualified to sit in the anchor’s chair as Julie Chen, or Jeff Probst, for that matter.

It is with her tongue-bathing courtiers in the media news racket, who have been working overtime to tell us every little bit of positive Couric news but asleep at the switch when it comes to doing open-eyed reporting on either a) her astonishing ratings plunge or b) the discussions inevitably underway in Les Moonves’s office about what to do next.

Hitsville’s candidate, incidentally, is Probst, who can’t do any worse ratings-wise and will cost the company about $14 million less annually than Couric.

Ideally, CBS News would use that money to hire 100 full-time reporters, though it’s hard to see Mr. Julie Chen devoting money to improving the quality of the product; he could have done that instead of hiring Couric in the first place.

Couric, as I have suggested before, can do a nightly infotainment show, up against Leno; even with her insane salary it should be able to do OK in the 10 p.m. slot.

I wish Howard Kurtz and his fellows were inquiring inside CBS what the networks long-term idea for the Evening News is.

NBC now has an audience more than half again as big as CBS’s, and more than that in the demo; its command of network news is buttressed by two powerful growing forces.

The economics of MSNBC helps keep a large news staff and stars like Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd gainfully employed and busy; CBS, by contrast, has to maintain an international news organization for a tiny half-hour nightly broadcast, “60 Minutes” and not much else. Short of buying CNN, there’s no way it can compete.

And now NBC is plainly the new administration’s go-to network; not for nothing did Obama pepper his Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner speech with references to Chuck Todd, Mika Brzezinski, and Williams. It’s particularly ironic that the celeb-friendly Couric was outflanked in this way at the dawn of the most glamorous White House in nearly fifty years.

Now, NBC has some own problems, too, particularly MSNBC: Keith Olbermann has turned, seemingly permanently, into a pompous blowhard; Rachel Maddow does not have the gravitas to be a serous force; and as for Ed … I don’t really understand Ed.

Still, for NBC News, both of those forces will have the momentum of critical mass behind them

In other words, CBS News has no ratings; a tarnished, out-of-place star; and no bench. Its management has no ideas, and when faced with problems turns not to change but PR assaults. That has done nothing but mask deepening wounds inside.

What can it do now but jettison its news division?

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Couric’s ratings: It gets worse
Confidential to Tom Shales and Howard Kurtz: Katie Couric’s ratings are in the tank again!
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 

TV Newser item here.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Couric’s ratings: It gets worse
Confidential to Tom Shales and Howard Kurtz: Katie Couric’s ratings are in the tank again!
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 

Remember a year or so ago, when Katie Couric’s ratings were so bad that … well, let’s let the NYT’s Bill Carter tell the story:

[T]he “CBS Evening News” recorded the worst five-night run in its history last week. The program attracted an average of only 5.4 million viewers for the week, which a CBS spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, said appeared to be the lowest it had ever received. That number was down from about 5.6 million the week before and 6 million two weeks ago.

That’s from a story dated April 23, 2008. Here we are a year later and … Couric averaged 5,380,000 viewers last week, according to this weekly posting from TV Newser.

I’m not a big ratings expert like Howard Kurtz, but isn’t 5,380,000 lower than 5,400,000? Why aren’t people talking about this?

As we have seen, Couric’s ratings lagged all year, even through the alleged buzz she got for the Sarah Palin interviews.

After the election, after the stock market meltdown, her ratings began creeping back up, cementing her position as The News Anchor America Turns to When the News Is Over™.

That prompted a massive PR push that too many people who should have known better participated in. (An almost tearfully clueless last gasp of that push can be seen here. How does a reporter write about a show’s ratings without, you know, looking at the ratings?)

Most humiliating line in the TV Newser blurb: “Year-to-year, [CBS] just maintained its demo delivery.”

“Just maintaining” the lowest ratings ever in the demo—there’s a silver lining.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Confidential to Tom Shales and Howard Kurtz: Katie Couric’s ratings are in the tank again!
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 

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?

———–

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 

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 

The Katie Couric Media Onslaught, charted here with alacrity, has slowed to a trickle. There was that appearance on Letterman last week, I guess, and this week just a Very Important Award from the USC J School, for those “extraordinary and persistent” Sarah Palin interviews.

When last we checked in with Couric’s actual ratings, we saw, despite all the spinning, squinting and selective citing of the data, her ratings were stuck at about 7 million.

The irony was that this was better than they had been during the campaign, which did not lack news interest. As Hitsville’s analysis proved, viewers really didn’t want Couric when actual historic events were taking place.

But, after the election was over, and after the financial meltdown had been addressed, then people felt they could go back to superficial Couric.

But now, it seems, they’ve checked her out again and … they’ve decided they really don’t like her that much. TV Newser helpfully collects the last few weeks of ratings here.

Couric had 7.2 million viewers the week of Feb. 2, coming off the inauguration high.

The next week, Feb. 9?

6.75 million.

Feb. 16? 6.73 million.

Feb. 23? 6.44 million—down for four weeks in a row, TV Newser notes.

And March 2? 6.44 million again.

She’s lost ten percent of her audience in a month, and this after the biggest PR assault the industry has seen in a long time.

Now, this number is above her bottom basement mark of some 5 million two years ago, but it’s not too much above the 5.9 million she had when all that talk started about her leaving the anchor position last April.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

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 

The NYT, in a front-page piece, analyzes the sticky revenue state the networks are in:

For the networks, the crisis is twofold: cultural and financial. For viewers, the result is more low-cost reality shows, prime-time talk and news programs and sports from the institutions that once made “Hill Street Blues,” “All in the Family” and “Cheers.”

NBC’s decision to move Jay Leno to a Monday-through-Friday slot at 10 p.m. eliminates the chance of the network developing another “ER” for that hour, but it will save the network tens of millions of dollars.

Doesn’t CBS have an albatross news anchor who’d be great for a “prime-time talk and news program” and would save the network the tens of millions it spends on “CSI”?

But Mr. Julie Chen, that albatross’s biggest supporter, says he’s not buying the premise:

One dissenter is Leslie Moonves, the chief of CBS, who defended network television at a media conference in December, saying, “I’m here to tell you—the model ain’t broken.”

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

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 

The words “Irving Azoff” haven’t appeared in the Times for at least the past week. He’s no Katie Couric!

Nor the LAT.

Dear Tom:

You’re the man. One of our sharpest pop-culture observers. So how did you fall under the odd gossamer aura that somehow seems to envelop Katie Couric every time a member of the media gets near?

Here are a few of the things I thought were weird in your story today, Tom:

1) The lede. “How about a big hand for the little lady?” you begin. Couric is not a serious newsperson, but even she doesn’t deserve such a condescending opening.

2) You refer to the “merciless pummeling” Couric has allegedly been getting in the media. Got any examples? I’ve been noticing a lot of puff pieces. From the Post, the NYT, the LAT. Not so much with the pummeling.

3) Tom, there’s too much selective citing of things that make Couric look good, but not enough skepticism. Example: You mention right up front that the CBS Evening News was “a newscast that had a lock on third place long before Couric took it over.” But you don’t note that Couric has taken it down even from that point! (Not to mention the many millions of new folks she brought to the broadcast to check her out originally—who then went somewhere else.)

4) Now, consider this construction:

If Couric stands a chance of elevating the newscast to second or first place in the nightly ratings, one reason may be that she’s finally the right anchor for the times.

First, let’s be honest: She has no chance of doing that; even with her recent advances, she’s several full rating points behind her competition. I’ll talk more about the numbers in a minute, but right now she’d have to increase her viewership by forty percent just to tie NBC.

Now, as for being the right anchor for the times, as I noted yesterday, her little ratings boost is of very recent vintage. Let’s think: What happened in the last month or two that might have affected her ratings? Oh, yeah—the election! After the election, after the stock market crash, after we got a new guy in to deal with the problem. Now people are going back to Couric. (And again, let’s remember we’re talking about a trifling number, but whatever.) Maybe it’s ’cause they didn’t really need Katie Couric for, you know, actual news.

5) Now, about that primetime special last night:

Couric reported Part 1 of an “exclusive” shocker series about domestic violence committed against spouses and girlfriends by troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. She gave this troubling story not “a woman’s touch” but the attention of a good reporter.

As is all too frequently the case with TV news, what she really gave attention to was the New York Times, which has doggedly been following this story for years, most recently and wrenchingly in a front page piece three weeks ago.  (“A focus on violence by returning G.I.s,” by Lizette Alvarez and Dan Frosch.) Do you think maybe Katie “I don’t even write my own blog” Couric got the idea there?

And, Tom, did you really make this observation? “The segment was labeled ‘Katie Couric Investigates’ to help raise her profile even higher.” Shouldn’t it have been called “Katie Couric reads the New York Times”?

6) OK, let’s talk ratings. You, like the LAT the other day, zero in on Couric’s recent uptick. But I noticed you didn’t crunch the numbers yourself, instead attributing them to the network:

NBC’s Brian Williams and his nightly newscast continue to score an emphatic first place in the Nielsens, with about 10.1 million viewers, followed by Charles Gibson and ABC with 9.1 million and Couric and CBS at 7.2 million. But Couric’s numbers are up about 5 percent over the same period as last year, CBS says.

But here, for example, is an NYT piece on evening news ratings from exactly one year ago:

In the extremely tight ratings race between the two leading evening news broadcasts, ABC’s “World News With Charles Gibson” last week edged past its rival, NBC’s “Nightly News With Brian Williams,” for the first time in eight weeks. Nielsen estimated that the ABC newscast drew 9.8 million viewers, its highest average in nearly a year and slightly more than the 9.6 million who tuned in to NBC. […]  Last week CBS’s “Evening News With Katie Couric” remained a distant third (7.13 million).

In other words, NBC is up five percent, ABC is down five percent, and Couric has an increase that is a rounding error.

7) Not having bothered to cite examples of the “merciless pummeling,” you get around to acknowledging the recent puff pieces:

“I am cognizant of it,” she says of the recent rash of pro-Couric reports, as opposed to dump-Couric stories. “I think if it’s true, the reason is partially that people are getting used to me in this role. And I’ve become increasingly comfortable in it.”

Tom, isn’t the “recent rash of pro-Couric reports” because of a concentrated PR campaign?

8 ) Then we get this:

Why did it take two years (after an initial, short-lived leap out of the starting gate) for Couric even to begin to catch on?

Here again, Tom, she’s not “catching on.” Even after her celebrated Sarah Palin interviews, her ratings didn’t improve. She was getting ratings in the high sixes when she and CBS began discussing her departure last year. (You refer to those as “rumors”—kinda of a cheesy way to refer to the WSJ’s big scoop, which was confirmed both by the Post at the time and as recently as this week by the LAT.)

All in all, Tom, a very disappointing piece. Here’s how your story should have begun:

Six months ago, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News might well part ways after the inauguration of the new president.

That time has now come.

Couric and her camp have accordingly embarked on a very big PR campaign to help her keep her job. But a close reading of her ratings show that, after a year that saw her draw the lowest numbers in the storied news organization’s history, she has made only modest inroads in her bottom-basement standings. Worse, the increase she has seen dates from just the last few weeks, underlining the fact that Couric could not draw viewers to her show during one of the most consequential, news-filled years of our lifetime.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

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 

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported what was obvious: That Katie Couric, whose ratings were abysmal, was in trouble and that, sooner or later, CBS would have to do something about it. The date mentioned in the article was “soon after the presidential inauguration”—or right about now! The next few weeks may tell a lot about Couric’s future.

The Couric camp has gone on a massive PR campaign, which this space has tried to keep track of. (See, among others, “Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™.”) The stories uniformly are upbeat on the (generally unspecified) triumphs Couric’s been cooking up, and don’t get too granular about those pesky ratings. These are puff pieces, and everyone involved knows what the rules are.

For the first, on the day before the United States watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, the Los Angeles Times, which apparently had some reporters around with nothing to do, took the time to give Couric a little tongue bath, just as the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz took the time to do the same for Couric over the Democratic convention. (Both stories answered the journalistic question: What is the anchor of the nation’s fourth most-watched news channel doing these days?)

“There’s no question that Couric emerged from the campaign with more buzz than either of her more-watched rivals,” the LAT assured us.

Buzz is nice! Ratings, however, are slightly different. CBS’s evening newscast remains not just in third place but a distant third place. Indeed, the actual ratings from inauguration day show ABC and NBC with audiences a full fifty percent higher than Couric’s. She barely beat CNN (!) and in fact CNN beat CBS in the 25 to 54 demo blah blah blah. (And that’s just home viewers; CNN has a massive additional viewership in commercial venues and offices, particularly on a Tuesday morning.)

To be fair, Couric’s ratings have been creeping back up, from the mid fives last April to just over 7 now. But note how the LAT had to choose its time-frames carefully to make the case:

Since September, the newscast has averaged 6.5 million viewers, on par with its average last season for those same months. But during the last five weeks, the program has attracted an average of 7.22 million viewers, a 7% hike over the same period last year.

Hmmm… the last five weeks. That would mean people started drifting back to CBS only after the election cycle ended.

New slogan, which CBS can have for free: “Where America Turns When the News is Over.”

The LAT story also has this tidbit, emphasis added:

That’s a marked change from this time last year, when Couric, frustrated with the program’s performance, met with McManus and CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves and discussed possibly leaving her post early, perhaps after the inauguration. The conversation was tabled until after the fall election, but media reports speculated that the anchor was on her way out.

Now, as Barack Obama prepares to take office, few expect Couric to be beating a hasty exit. CBS officials said they haven’t raised the topic again with the anchor.

At the time, both Couric and CBS denied they’d had that discussion; now the officials are plainly saying they did. The story should have noted that they (and Couric) lied at the time, and that the original WSJ story was correct.

Meanwhile, over in Portfolio, Couric plays the sexism card, heavily. She says:

Why do you think so many people had a negative reaction to Hillary Clinton? She’s ambitious. And I think there are still qualities that when women exhibit them are less acceptable than when men naturally exhibit them—like ambition.

Have you suffered from similar problems with your press coverage?

I think there might be some of that. It might be because of my background—that I did a morning show and that people didn’t necessarily think I was a serious person.

Of course, Couric isn’t a serious person (she’s by far the least qualified news anchor we’ve ever seen, barring perhaps Connie Chung), and she’s getting terrible ratings, and yet her press coverage has been disconcertingly positive. Journalists have an affirmative obligation to be intellectually honest; isn’t it a little cheap for her to invent this negative coverage and then attribute it to sexism?

Portfolio doesn’t dwell on that. Check out how the issue of ratings are brought up in this exchange:

Network-news shows are seeing their ratings wither away. Are you disappointed about the ­format’s decreasing influence?

Clearly I knew this was a declining genre when I came here, because I’m not an idiot, you know? I knew that network news was declining, and evening newscasts in particular.

The point is of course true in the larger sense, but the fact remains as well that NBC, for example, is building on its previous top standing … and that Couric, even with her recent bump, has frittered away some forty percent of the audience she had starting out, and has ratings that remain lower than her predecessor’s in the slot. (She covers up the unfortunate post-election ratings increase this way: “But I think during the election cycle we really broke out in an important way.”)

And just to underline the fact that she’s not journalistically fit to hold her chair, she lies to the Porfolio guy as well:

There was talk a while back that suggested you were going to leave the CBS Evening News before your contract was up.

All those stories were really blown out of proportion.

Meaning they were not accurate?

No, they weren’t.

Now the big news is that CBS is going to give Couric some prime-time real estate Wednesday evening to ply her wares, and hopefully try to bring some of the network’s later-evening audience back to her earlier show. This will not of course work, but at some point the network’s over-reliance on forensic cop shows is going to backfire, and not even a returning Billy Petersen will be able to solve the case. You heard it here first: Couric will go up against Jay Leno, nightly at ten.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

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 

Lots of comments on A refusal to mourn the death, by downsizing, of the metro daily film-crit corps and The era of the “mom and pop film critic” is over.

Zod writes:

Mourning the newspaper is like mourning the 8-track tape. It’s not that people don’t want film criticism, it’s that they can get it in an easier-to-use format at a time of their choosing. Newspapers as businesses have made the same mistake the music industry made: Confusing the product and its method of delivery. There likely are more people reading now than at any time in human history. It’s a news organization’s challenge to figure out how to monetize that fact.

HV: And Google, for example, did figure out how to monetize it.

Roger Ebert:

Regarding Heidi, Spencer, Amy or Pete…the only one whose name I recognized was Amy. I’m surprised you knew who Suri was. I didn’t. And I may have some sad news. The Village Voice chain is set to go nationally with Scott Foundras and Jim Hoberman as their critics, firing all their local writers. No mention of Ella Taylor. [Roger wrote to say he’d since found out that Taylor remains at the LA Weekly–Hitsville.] I hope it isn’t true. The internet is great at giving you free access to writers someone else has to pay. Manohla Dargis and Tony Scott, for example, are paid by the New York Times to write for your pleasure. I don’t know of a single critic making a living from online work. Well, probably Harry Knowles, who has better critics writing for his site than you might guess by looking at it. I believe he pays for their reviews, but I highly doubt it is a living wage. Oh, also the Salon and Slate critics, although Salon laid off Charles Taylor. In fact, NO ONE can support him or herself off the web alone. Certainly not me. All five of the critics you mention are paid by their papers, if that still includes Ella. The New York Times used to send Canby to Cannes to hang out for a few days and write a couple of pontifications. Now Tony and Manohla do almost-daily blogs and video reports and chats, in addition to their print coverage. Like doing two jobs for teh price of one. When kids tell me they want to be movie critics, I say, “Great! How will you support yourself?” Most of the professional film critics in America earn their living wages and get their health benefits by teaching. Not that it’s a bad thing, just that I’m glad you enjoy the free lunch.

HV: Roger’s last point is an important one; we are getting a free lunch—those folks whose reviews of Australia I cited (Ken Turan in the LAT, Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly, Todd McCarthy in Variety, and Manohla Dargis in the NYT) I got to read for something close to free. (Though all had ads on their pages, and I do pay for the NYT and Variety in print.) And a lot of high profile journos are working harder. (Not all, like Katie Couric, get their blogs written for them by staffers.) All that said, I think there are still things the papers and the writers need to be doing better to adjust to a new world; rightness and wrongness at this point don’t enter into it. There’s a complex set of trade-offs being negotiated now: on the one hand, readers are getting access to more and better criticism; on the other, the vast middle of workaday film critics are seeing their profession evaporate, in the same way, at newspapers, typesetters and paste-up people did. They never got the same outpouring of concern.

Richard Blaine:

When it comes to film criticism, hell, when it comes to just plain writing, Ebert is god. You totally ignored one of his central arguments — the fact that critics are now being limited to 500 words. It’s that USA Today effect. Even Rotten Tomatoes puts online critics in a lesser category — few take them seriously. The age of great film criticism is ending. It’s now all about celebrity gossip and E! The news is being dumbed down, just like in other areas. How sad.

But we’ll always have Paris.

HV: I think this is not true. There’s a great deal of amazing film writing on the web; not only is there more than there ever was, it’s more accessible. Many years ago, living in SF, I remember how hard it was to get to read Jonathan Rosenbaum or Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader; indeed, if you didn’t actually live in Chicago or, say, LA, where the LA Weekly critics published their writing, it was almost impossible to get your eyes on it. 

As for Paris Hilton, maybe I’m just not trolling the right web sites, but she doesn’t really impact my life. Complaints like this seem to me a little bit received; I hear more people complaining about Paris Hilton than I see or hear her personally.

Zod:

Mr. Ebert also should admit complicity in his perception of the “death” of criticism. He and Mr. Siskel boiled 1,200-word film reviews down to two thumbs. He also is a branded name — a celebrity, if you will — whose criticism moviegoers will seek online over the reviews of their local film critic.

HV: A touch! But seriously, Siskel and Ebert elevated the form, just as Michael Kinsley originally did on Crossfire, for example. (In later iterations, we could see how degraded the form could become.) I don’t think two smart people arguing about movies is a bad thing. As for the thumbs, it was a canny marketing device that has nicely transcended the media upheavals that have made the careers of many of us much more challenging.

Brian:

Across the board, we’re being weaned on an ADD-friendly, short-shorter news item diet.

And RottenTomatoes.com falls into that pattern; though it’s a great gateway to write-ups by critics of all stripes, most people simply scan the RT pages and excerpted blurbs. They don’t read full reviews anymore, for the most part. They plug into a Tomatometer figure, clck through a couple of pages, and that’s it.

HV: This is a cri de coeur about humantity, not criticism. It’s what people want. I don’t care if some people like short or inane reviews. I don’t think there’s a right way to use Rotten Tomatoes, either. I like longer, smarter reviews, and the web gives me more of them than I could ever have dreamed of.

Don Singleton:

I use reviews as an aid in deciding whether to spend the price of a movie ticket on a particular film. Over many years, I have depended on Roger Ebert’s commentary in the making of these decisions. Do I need to know all of Roger’s inner thoughts about a given film? No. In fact, most of the time I can depend on the number of stars he awards the film, but I do enjoy reading the reviews to the end and appreciating his insights and comments. I also consider TV critics’ reviews that run on the news shows I watch, and occasionally I scan the “reviews” section of the movie timetable web site I use.
To me, movie reviews are not to be considered on the level of brain surgery or Ph.D. theses. But for those who do take the issue that seriously, there are plenty of college courses available, and probably more than a few web sites that provide unlimited opportunity for deep thoughts and bloviations.
And as for reviewers in local newspapers, come on, give me a break.

Sammy:

I think you should consider Ebert’s insightful rebuttal carefully. The dilemma here is this: it’s great to have cheap access to the news services the new economy affords us. It is. But, across the board, if we shift the outlay we will make for media and entertainment down, the actual labor behind it is likely to dissipate. This isn’t a universal in economics, of course. In commodity markets, driving costs down with competition can be a very good thing. The concern is whether we are losing a baseline in quality with “online journalism”. As someone well acquainted with the bloggers working for the GawkerMedia empire, I can say their standards simply don’t match a real press outlet. And they know that. That’s why they pay so badly. This directly relates to Mr. Ebert’s point in that the long-term trend here is our criticism might be in the hands of IMDB type posters. If that doesn’t scare you, we just won’t see eye to eye… perhaps the age of elitism is gone, but I know I’ll miss some of it.

HV: I agree with you about a lot of the Gawker folks, though Idolator, for example, is consistently pretty smart. Otherwise, I think you’re idealizing print journalism. The human costs of the layoffs aside, as I said in my original post it’s hard to argue that there’s not more and better film criticism available, by at least an order of magnitude, to virtually everyone in the U.S. Indeed, the real worry might be about an age of super elitism, with, as I said, a corps of supercritics. But the nature of the web means that there will always be an empowered (if, perhaps, unpaid) undercorps.

mjweir:

This amuses me. With the quality of the films a typical viewer has access to, it’s difficult for me to understand why we need critics. I don’t need anyone from the NYT to give me a review of the Pirates of the Caribbean part XXIII. I don’t need anyone to tell me that the latest comedy full of fart humor aimed at 15 year old boys or men who act like them might not be for me.

The declining quality of film and the average joe’s access to it has played a larger role in the lack of critical assessment than has any other factor. With most towns only availability to film being the pablum shoveled by their local nationally owned multiplex conglomerate how can most people even recognize good film let alone have the variety to be critical.

Blame Hollywood. They have dumbed down the offering until like network television, it’s difficult to find anything that isn’t like a huge steaming bowl of gruel. It fills a few hours if you can stand the boredom.

HV: Here again, I feel like I’m living in a different universe from the commenter. Start with two or three dozen film channels. Add Tivo and Netflix … and the world starts looking pretty good. Then throw in ever-cheapening plasma screens, HD cable and Blu-ray, and the dawn of day-and-date DVD releases, and all of a sudden you can see a movie the way it was meant to be seen and not in a foul multiplex. How on earth are we not living in a movie lover’s paradise?

Peter Nellhaus:

“A click or two more and I have at my disposal the collective wisdom of the internets’ collective film writing, the intellectual equivalent of that sandworm in Dune, majestic and slightly nauseating at the same time.”What do you mean by this?

There is some intelligent and even vital writing on film online, if you know where to look. Not everyone blogging on film is a fanboy.

What is not addressed is that simultaneously, how films are viewed has changed. Just as the viewer is not dependent on the newspaper for criticism, the viewer does not have to go to a theater. That I can see more international films and classic films than before on DVD changes both how I see films and what I see.

HV: As I hope I have made clear, the sandworm reference was a respectful one.

karsten:

You mentioned Bosley Crowther with distaste, which naturally led me to look up the reviews of this man whom I’d never heard of. Surprise, surprise–they’re pretty brilliant. He writes with real zest, in that urbane, cyncial, British style that is a delight to read. He also seems pretty balanced in his reviews (e.g., Rashomon), far from a “thumbs up/thumbs down” mentality. It’s wonderful to encounter critical, perceptive, at-the-time reviews of films that have, over time, become sacred cows. He politely applauds “It’s a Wonderful Life,” for example, but pooh-poohs some of its sentimental and juvenile aspects (calling the banker “a parody of Scrooge”–which, let’s face it, he is).

Thanks for leading me to a critic whose work is such a treat. Too bad he retired in the 1960s. I’d love to have heard his opinions about the movies of the 1970s and on, let alone those that are out there now.

HV: Crowther was not entirely hostile to good film, but he was never a real writer; in any case, the 1960s caught him up, and he ended his run a caricature. Mark Harris details his career and its undoing at the hands of Bonnie and Clyde in Pictures at a Revolution.

Albert:

Roger Ebert has a valid point. Even Entertainment Weekly is getting into the act. I don’t think for a second that it’s a profound magazine at all, but over the last few months, it seems to have gotten just a teeny bit smaller. And now, on the review pages of any item, be it a movie, an album, a play, a TV show, a book, or a DVD, the editors actually highlight what they feel is the essence of their review in darker print than the rest of it, as if they were acknowledging that that’s all readers care about - the one basic idea. How convenient! Now we can go straight to the important point in the review without having to bother with the rest of it.

Oh, brother!

When even “Entertainment Weekly” panders to short attention spans, you know you’re in trouble.

HV: The great thing about the modern world is … we don’t have to read Entertainment Weekly.

Cinegeek:

I think you make a valid point that “mourning” the loss of the newspaper film critic is a little over-dramatic. However, I think the real problem is in regard to people like me: young, fanatic about movies, and wanting to get into the film critic business. If newspapers (and possibly other publishing outlets that pay in the future) downsize, then how will I ever make a living off my dream job?

Blogging sure helps, but if you are like me and can’t seem to find the time to blog every day about movies because you are struggling to make ends meet, what is a budding film critic to do if the newspapers that could potentially hire him aren’t interested?

HV: It’s tough out there. Write a blog until you develop a fanatic and loyal audience, and then try to get some larger media company to pick you up.

 A Braunsdorf:

Ebert wasn’t so much bemoaning the death of newspapers as the whole idea of criticism in the media (and that includes the web). And he’s right, mostly. I have many times seen TV shows do little more than show trailers or EPK interview soundbites where, in another time, they may have actually reviewed the film. Remember Leonard Maltin reviewing movies on “Entertainment Tonight”? There hasn’t been anything like a review of anything on that show for years.

For instance, the new “At the Movies” runs down titles coming out on DVD with no mention of the movies being good or bad. Followed by some recommendations, admittedly, but why no commentary on the new releases? Isn’t that the point of the show? Oh, it’s not? That’s what Roger was talking about.

And it’s not just there, it’s all over the media. His example of the “buzz” around Twilight is dead-on. How many articles did we see about the fans versus the movie (or the book) itself?

Where people used to actually discuss things, now they just mention them. “Twilight! Benjamin Button! Star Trek!” There. Can I have my press pass now?

HV: One last time. Don’t watch it! Read Movie City News, or Crazy Nikki, or Jeffrey Wells, or the great Mr. Ebert.

p.s.: Speaking of which, check out Ebert’s takedown of that silly Ben Stein documentary on creationism. 

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!

A few weeks ago, during the epic non-coverage of the John Edwards scandal, I wrote this:

I’ve been a media editor for many years and can tell you where the vast percentage of “media coverage” comes from. A big story breaks. Cue some upper editor, affecting sagacity and sucking on an imaginary journalistic pipe: “We should really take a look at the media coverage of this!” There was no actual story to do that a reader might find interesting, just, “Let’s take a look at the media coverage!” That’s “media writing” in the most insipid, Howard Kurtzian sense of the term.

Now, with the Edwards embarrassment behind it, big media can go back to the business as usual I described. Here’s the NYT today, with a quarter-page story, hedlined “TV Cameras Turn from G.O.P to Storm,” about how TV is covering  Hurricane Gustav rather than the Republican Convention.

ST. PAUL — The network news anchors, Katie Couric, Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, were diverted from here on Sunday, and with them went Senator John McCain’s chance to command the national stage for four nights before a huge television audience.

As it became clear on Sunday morning that Hurricane Gustav had the potential to do enormous damage to the Gulf Coast, the networks began upending their schedules for the Republican National Convention and reassigned many of their stars to a story that they believed had greater news potential.

Since there is nothing interesting to say on the subject beyond the hedline, by the end of the second paragraph, the poor reporter, Jim Rutenberg, has restated the hed’s thesis twice. In the fourth graf, he states it again:

Most of the broadcast networks had been planning to open their morning and evening newscasts on Monday from the floor of a convention hall festooned with signs promoting Mr. McCain’s message, “Country First.” But by midday, executives at the networks had for the most part decided to open their marquee programs from the Gulf Coast, a place that holds embarrassing symbolism for the Republican brand.

… and again, in graf seven:

The networks were careful to say that they still planned to devote an exceptional amount of coverage to the Republican convention, if and when it began in earnest. But, they said, depending on the impact of the storm, the convention was likely to have to share the news stage.

… and graf eight:

For news executives, there was little debate over whether to divert resources to the Gulf Coast as the storm built through Sunday morning.

… and several more times through the rest of the story.

That’s the modern way to cover the media. Over at the Washpost, Howard Kurtz has already bounced back from his humiliating role not just in the non-coverage of the Edwards debacle but his failure to write about the non-coverage. Last week he was back to his old tricks, adding yet another tonguebath of Katie Couric to his portfolio*.

Today, he leaps into action to discuss the implications of this momentous coverage switch, spelling out the mundanity of the decision with typical aplomb and at typical length:

“It’s kind of a no-brainer,” Kate O’Brian, ABC’s senior vice president, said of the decision to send [anchor Charles] Gibson to New Orleans. “Charlie goes where the big news is. . . . I don’t think it’s going to be looked at as a fairness issue when the Republicans are making the same decisions we are.”

By suspending all but minor business functions for Monday’s session, McCain’s team essentially ratified the media’s decision that the mass evacuation ordered in advance of a life-threatening hurricane is, for the moment, a more compelling story.

*The lengthy Couric piece joins others I detailed here. Note how it carefully avoids getting into Couric’s horrific ratings or dwelling on the pathetic one hour a night CBS gave the convention early in the week. Nothing wrong with a beat reporter sucking up to a source, but Couric at this point is one of the walking dead, professionally speaking. Does anyone care about what life is like for the least-watched news person of any consequence on all of television? How does Kurtz pitch the story to his editors? (”I would like to spend the day tagging along with a person whose work is entirely spurious to the event at hand.”) If he doesn’t have any oversight on stories like this, why didn’t he display the same carte blanche during the Edwards affair?

The status of Katie Couric at the CBS Evening News anchor chair came up again at the Television Critics Association; on a satellite feed, Couric was asked about those reports she would be leaving CBS.

Her boss, CBS prez Sean McManus, said flatly that those reports weren’t true.  Couric said the same thing: “Yeah, I can echo that. We have no plans to part company any time soon.”

Couric and McManus are lying. Here’s the Rebecca Dana WSJ story that started the issue off three months ago:

After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the “CBS Evening News” anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011—possibly soon after the presidential inauguration early next year.

Ms. Couric isn’t even halfway through her five-year contract with CBS, which began in June 2006 and pays an annual salary of around $15 million. But CBS executives are under pressure to cut costs and improve ratings for the broadcast, which trails rival newscasts on ABC and NBC by wide margins.

Since then, Couric’s ratings have declined. For what it’s worth, the story wasn’t reporting that plans were under way for her departure; just that the two sides had accepted reality, which in the TV world means that if you take over a lagging news show and then lose 25 percent of its viewership and counting, you don’t get to keep your job.

Couric has trafficked in celebrity worship for so long she’s a celebrity now herself, which means she gets treated like one and acts like one, which is all just one of the many reasons she shouldn’t be anchoring a news show. Celebrities lie all the time, which is what Couric is doing here and another reason she shouldn’t be anchoring a news show.

One of the TV critics should have asked her, “If you leave the Evening News after the inauguration, the way the WSJ said you would, would it be fair for us to call you a big fat liar?”

You have to read down a ways in this Radar post by Charles Kaiser, but there’s something very sad he gets to. It’s about blog postings by NBC anchor Brian Williams. Now, Williams apparently does not have the Katie Couric problem, which is not writing her own material.

(She got in trouble after one of her ghostwriters was found to have plagiarized columnist Jeffrey Zazlow.)

(There are so many things wrong with that previous sentence it makes one’s head spin.)

Anyway, Willams’s blog is indubitably personal, right down to the shifting fonts. He begins by meandering on about soft news coverage of the NYT. His evidence? Stories in the Styles section. (Confidential to B.W.: News stories are in the section that has the words “The New York Times” in big letters at the top of the page. The Styles section is about … styles ‘n’ stuff. )

Then comes a paean to a Peggy Noonan column that is an attack on Barack Obama’s patriotism. Here’s what Noonan wrote:

Main thought. Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama’s problem. America is Mr. Obama’s problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men’s Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter’s Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There’s gold in that history.

[…]

Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That’s why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country – any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?

Another challenge. Snooty lefties get angry when you ask them to talk about these things. They get resentful. Who are you to question my patriotism? But no one is questioning his patriotism, they’re questioning its content, its fullness.

Says Williams: “Peggy is doing the work of her career and must be considered an early favorite for next cycle’s Pulitzer for commentary.” Actually, she’s doing the work of the Republican ight-wing attack machine, trying to stir up the yahoos by branding Obama as the Other.

Kaiser has a killer point to make: Why hasn’t Williams, if he’s looking for news in the NYTimes, done a story on his news show about the Times’ huge investigation into how the Pentagon has been secretly training former military men to go out and repeat administration-approved talking points on the war in the guise of objective military analysts for the networks? Kaiser:

NBC, CBS, and ABC have all ignored the story, presumably because it makes all of them look terrible. But after Williams’ blog readers pounced, the anchor finally offered a defense for the use of these retired talking heads—an account that many of his NBC colleagues considered wholly inadequate. Williams explained that he was close friends with two of the “heavily decorated U.S. Army four-star generals”—Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey—that they had made plenty of criticisms of the war and, therefore, there was no problem. Then he added: “I can only account for the men I know best,” but he was sure that “[a]t no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers.” That is implausible.

In any case, the anchor’s explanation ignored the main point of the Times piece: that virtually all of these generals, including McCaffrey, worked for or consulted with military contractors, and the big advantage of participating in the Pentagon’s propaganda program was the number of inside tips they got about new war contracts that were becoming available in Iraq.

Over in Slate, Troy Patterson offers an argument that seems to have started out only half-serious but becomes pretty compelling as he marches away through the network’s news-related programing. Katie Couric is obviously not enjoying the job, CBS Sunday Morning is moribund, The Early Show is fluff etc. etc.:

A brief word about CBS Sunday Morning: While it is obvious that this network’s coverage and presentation of current events is geared toward old people, the target audience of Charles Osgood’s show seems to be already dead—peacefully so.

Patterson also lights out on the sacred cow that is 60 Minutes:

We’re supposed to have some respect for 60 Minutes and I’m not entirely sure why that is. The most recent episode began with a Lara Logan piece on a Special Forces unit in Afghanistan. It was teased as a tale of valor that would also expose why we are losing in Afghanistan. In reality, it only addressed one of these topics. Guess which! Recounting a battle between the Green Berets and the Taliban, Logan—whose hair was mussed, which I take to be a considered choice—gave us a boys’ adventure story of the old school. It takes nothing away from the courage and sacrifice of these soldiers to say that the segment was an encyclopedia of war-story treacle: “I thought, ‘If I’m going down, I’m taking them with me,’ ” and so on.

The reason we’re supposed to have respect for 60 Minutes is that it does occasionally do actual strong journalism but it’s also true that 80 percent of the time, when you tune in, there’s nothing like strong journalism on the show. My pet peeve are the puffy profiles; the 60 Minutes angle is to give viewers the same fluff the lighter shows do, but with a patina of seriousness. The correspondents gaze quizzically at some celebrity, screwing their face up to get ready to ask an insipid question in a very hard-hitting way: “Was working with Steven the best experience of your professional life?”

But the show is such a hit it will never go away. But that can’t be said for the rest of the news division. There are of course many talented journalists working there, but at this point, even the fretting about the effects of cost-cutting on the division is a decades old routine, going back to the Lawrence Tisch and Westinghouse years.

There are two cable channels that provide fairly strong news coverage available to anyone in the country not too cheap to lay out for basic cable, so CBS News has no raison d’etre when it comes to breaking news. It also means that its reporting staff is comparatively puny. The company has virtually no web presence. While there is patently no one there with the programming smarts to figure out how to contend in the modern world, it’s also rue that there is no answer to the network’s big problem: It’s flagship show offers a product—a digest of the stories of the day wrapped up in a cute little package at 6:30 p.m.—that no one wants any more. CBS News is basically a typewriter.

Says the NYT:

On Tuesday CBS received ratings results that put an exclamation point on its troubles: the “CBS Evening News” recorded the worst five-night run in its history last week.

The program attracted an average of only 5.4 million viewers for the week, which a CBS spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, said appeared to be the lowest it had ever received.

Emphasis added. The story puts a punctuation mark, a loud one, on the stories about Couric from last week to the effect that she and CBS brass had begun discussing her departure from the anchor chair.

Just a few days ago I wrote about Howard Kurtz spinning wildly for Couric on his CNN show, claiming she had seven million viewers. I wrote then she actually had just less than six, and we can see her ratings declining by another ten percent since then.

The amazing thing is that Couric began with thirteen million viewers. She has lost more than seven and a half million.

I want to be careful writing about this, because it all has nothing to do with her being female, or a blonde, or any of the other superficial things that come up. There are huge forces at work that Couric could not hope to combat: CBS can’t maintain a news division that can compete with a cable channel’s; and of course when you’re owned by MTV no one up top really cares about quality news coverage anyway. (Les Moonves is married to intrepid newswoman Julie Chen, the hard-hitting host of … “Big Brother.”)

All that said, Couric’s huge salary sucks money out of the newsroom; and she is by far the least qualified person ever to have sat in that chair. Everyone talks about her success as the host of the Today show, but few people talk about what a superficial and chirpy waste of air time it is. A couple of people have told me I sounded mean when writing about Couric last week. Forgive me for quoting myself, but this is why she doesn’t belong in the CBS anchor chair:

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.

p.s. : The Times story contained these two paragraphs, side by side:

The poor results for CBS came in a week that included confirmation of a meeting in February in which Ms. Couric and her agent had discussed with Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, and Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, the possibility that she might leave the anchor position sometime after the presidential election.

On Friday Mr. Moonves and Mr. McManus visited CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street in Manhattan in an effort to raise morale and offered their full backing to Ms. Couric, saying she would definitely continue as their anchor.

That’s good for morale: Lying to the troops.

____________

Previously in Hitsville:

Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later

When we lasted visited Howard Kurtz, a day or two ago, he was in the pages of the Washington Post scrambling to play catch up when the WSJ scooped him on a big CBS/Katie Couric story: that she was “likely to leave the network.” Kurtz credited the Journal … eventually, but didn’t mention his own softball feature on Couric in the Post a few days before, in which everything sounded fine and dandy in Couricland.

Kurtz followed up on his Reliable Sources CNN show Sunday. A few days on, he decided it was safe to forget the Journal’s scoop. Indeed, to hear him tell it Sunday, the story was all his:

But a year and a half after her debut, sources tell me that Katie Couric is talking to her CBS bosses about giving up the anchor chair after the election. Both sides frustrated that nothing seems to be working in digging the broadcast out of its third-place hole. No final decision yet, but it’s now likely that Couric will be relinquishing the job and possibly leaving the network.

For the record, I think a press critic who doesn’t bend over backward to acknowledge a competitor like that doesn’t belong in the job, but of course Kurtz’s ethical lapses pale next to the rampant conflicts of interest he juggles holding the jobs of both press critic and press reporter at two different outlets, the Post and CNN.

Anyway, there was speculation—from CBS scold Bernard Goldberg, primarily—that Couric’s side leaked this story, but if Kurtz was mad at her helping the Journal and not him after his little Couric puff piece you couldn’t tell from the broadcast, in which he was at pains to spin the thing Couric’s way. Note above, for example, how suddenly it was Couric telling her bosses she might leave.

Then comes this nonsensical defense:

Well, let me give you my two cents. I mean, if you look at the cold, hard Nielsen numbers, yes, you would have to say that Katie Couric has failed. But drawing nearly seven million viewers a night is not failure compared to other forms of media delivery. Going to Iraq, anchoring on Super Tuesday, interviewing General Petraeus, that’s not failure either.

But of course the issue is that Couric has been losing viewers since she started. And mentioning the words “seven million viewers” and “Katie Couric” in the same sentence can only be justified if … you haven’t looked at the ratings in the last month. Couric didn’t have seven million viewers last week; she didn’t even have six million. (And again, while one hates to buy into the ageist network demographics, it’s also true that less than two million of that total are between the ages of 25 and 54, which is why it was CBS execs talking to Couric about leaving rather than vice-versa.)

Finally, while Kurtz gets on his high horse about another commentator remarking on Couric’s clothes, he himself refers to her as “Katie” in the show, a hugely unprofessional and sexist thing to do.

Howard Kurtz is the press reporter and the press critic for the Washington Post and CNN. Having dual roles on dual outlets creates a web of conflicts of interest that make his job essentially pointless. He will always tackle the surface issue and avoid the deeper, more important one; he belabors the obvious and overlooks the subtle. You always get the sense he’ll skate past the hard stuff rather than address it, as someone in his position should.

Case in point: Check out his story late last week on the Katie Couric hullabaloo. The Wall Street Journal posted a story Wednesday afternoon with a good clean scoop: saying that Couric’s future in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News was in doubt, and that she might be out as soon as early next year, after the new president is inaugurated in January.  Kurtz then had to scramble to get similar “news” into the pages of the Post for the next morning. Seven grafs into a thirteen graf story, he acknowledged that the Journal had it first.

Why didn’t Kurtz write his story this way?

“I’m the press critic here at the Washington Post, and the press reporter as well. So I’d like to take this moment to give you some news, and also reveal the workings of the newspaper biz.

The WSJ scooped my ass yesterday; they posted online a story about how people inside CBS were beginning to visualize a future without Katie Couric. It’s not that big of a deal—Couric’s ratings are an embarrassment, and the company has to do something one of these days, before the CBS Evening News starts getting beaten by “Saved by the Bell” reruns.

But, instead of doing a little adventuresome reporting about what any peabrain could see was going to happen, your humble narrator contented himself with an innocuous feature on Couric less than a week ago. It was a good example of what is occasionally referred to in newsrooms, in somewhat vulgar terms, as a “blowjob piece.” I asked her softball questions, she got to spin her position till the cows came home, and I didn’t add any uncomfortable follow-up questions or interview any outside parties.

It looks pretty lame right now, but the idea is you suck up to players like her in the hopes of maybe getting a tidbit of a scoop later on down the line.

Unfortunately, the Journal caught me with my pants down; just a couple of days after my no-news spectacular, they posed their story, and managed to ruin the rest of my Wednesday, as I scrambled to play catch up and basically regurgitate the news for your folks in you next morning’s Post.

If that hadn’t happened, I was just going to spent yesterday compiling old stuff I’d written into my next book, but in theory I could have spent it trying to scoop the Journal on some other story. Instead, as I said, I played catch-up, rewriting the WSJ, crediting them far enough down in the story so most folks wouldn’t notice, and not mentioning at all my intrepid exclusive interview with Couric just a few days previous.

And that, my friends, is a glimpse into how a modern press reporter operates.”