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 

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 

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!

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?”

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

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.”

In Bill Carter’s lengthy NYT story today about Katie Couric’s (and CBS’s) behind-the-scenes game-playing to get the network a debate, there is one voice that is never heard from.

That’s the journo somewhere in CBS News saying, “Great Jesus Christ; it has come to the point where we’re going around begging to host a debate? A primary debate?!?”

CBS News, of course, was a fairly significant new operation, several decades ago. (The idea that broadcast news organizations are in the same league with the top-level print leviathans is quaint, but most people feel it was a serious outfit.) What happened next is complicated, but basically, the rise of cable news changed the world, MTV bought it, and then the world changed again.

As cost-cutting and collapsing internal standards took their toll, its evening news program drifted. The network’s response was to take a soft news celebrity face and try to skate for a few more years on fluff. That hasn’t worked so well: Its nightly news ratings are generally about 75 percent of those of NBC. By all accounts Couric’s enormous salary sucks cash out of the newsroom, and since the network doesn’t have a cable network its back-of-the-broadcast costs are going to remain high.

The coverage the broadcast news organizations get in the journalism world far outstrips their importance. “Eight million viewers–that’s a lot,” someone will say, roughly, of NBC’s (or ABC’s) nightly viewers. I hate to play the “seniors don’t count” card, but actual viewership in the 25 to 54 demographic is less than a third of that for all the networks, and I think there aren’t too many folks under 25 tuning in to see Couric.

For reasons I’ve written about before, I don’t take Couric seriously as a newsperson, and apparently few others do as well. Now the network is so desperate that we’re seeing new erosions of standards. The spectacle of the person who sits in a nightly broadcasts news anchor seat so desperate for ratings that she personally calls the campaigns of political figures and twists arms to get a debate–as the Times detailed–is something out of a Paddy Chayefsky script.

Beyond that, in the event, what possible argument can she make? “I’ll be nice to you?” “I’ll be mean to the other guy?” “I’ll be nice to you if you’re president?” “CBS News will remember this?” Is there a single thing Couric could say that wouldn’t on its face compromise her objectivity and that of her network? It’s the equivalent of calling up Obama and asking him to make an appearance at her daughter’s birthday party. There’s nothing in it for him at all; but how could he refuse?

Variety’s Brian Lowry has a short but powerful look at the predicament CBS is in. It’s typically clear-headed piece from by far the most penetrating observer of the industry writing today:

The only real tragedy in all this, frankly, would be if anyone drew too many conclusions about Couric’s predicament based on her gender. The move-and-flop pattern hardly discriminates by sex, as evidenced by former “Today” colleague Bryant Gumbel’s stumbling leap to CBS a decade ago as host of the short-lived “Public Eye.”

Lowry’s sympathetic to Couric but notes what happens next isn’t going to be pretty, when

there’s no longer the luxury of conducting the descent, when the time comes, under the shroud of darkness.

I think, in fact, he’s *too* sympathetic. 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.