Bill Kurtis is a serious guy, and by any account would be on the higher end of the (admittedly limited) spectrum of TV investigative reporting. In recent years he’s become more of a crime-show host than investigator, but it’s still a shock to see him shilling for a crummy cellphone company:

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

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?