One of the things I think the press doesn’t do well is deal with liars. Corporate culture, which involves a lot of lying, is taken for granted. The corporate folks have it both ways: When accused of something, they say, “Oh we would never do that! I’m a husband, a father! I have children! We would never pollute that river/steal our customers’ money/break myriad federal laws/etc. etc. etc. ”

And when they are caught, they say, “Well, it was my responsibility to the shareholders to not acknowledge the truth at that juncture.”

Now, that’s how it goes with crimes and scandals, but it also happens at a much less toxic level on a quotidian basis, but the liars in questions rarely get called on it.

We saw it the other day, when Les Moonves, the head of CBS, visited CBS News to try to buck up staff morale. Wrote the NY Times:

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.

Emphasis added. Moonves was of course lying to his staff and the public; several national papers had already reported that Moonves and Couric had begun to discuss her departure, and, as we saw a few days later, Couric’s ratings are down to unprecedentedly low levels in any case, and no one at the network has a plan to raise them.

Which is fine. My complaint is with the press, which next week will begin referring to him again blandly as “CBS chairman Les Moonves.” Why don’t they call him a liar, too? Why don’t we see journalism like:

“… Moonves said, though in the past when asked about CBS matters he has lied,” or,

“… said the CBS Chairman, a known liar.”

It’s worse because he has ultimate oversight of an institution, CBS News, that should be synonymous with intergrity and forthrightness. It is a funny thing to natter on about, these days, but that’s just another example of what doesn’t get said:

“Moonves, though the titular head of an organization that asks millions of Americans to trust its reporting, lies a lot.”

I don’t think it’s a cheap shot to bring his marriage into this; he’s married to Julie Chen, who besides being several decades younger than him is allowed to be both a correspondent on the CBS Early Show and host of “Big Brother.” Talking about ethics is a pointless exercise when it comes to reality TV, of course, but shouldn’t someone care that a CBS newsperson like Chen spends half her time giving pretend reality to viewers?

Like maybe the chairman of her network? Oh, wait …

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