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April 2008
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Less than halfway through her five-year contract to anchor the CBS Evening News, Katie Couric is a woman on the verge of newsdesk breakdown. The Wall Street Journal reports that Ms. Couric may be out as soon as the next president is inaugurated. Citing unnamed sources, in the form of "both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric," WSJ says that CBS executives are under pressure to make a change. Apparently, there's some feeling within the company that around $15 million a year -- Ms. Couric's salary -- is a bit too steep a price tag for a move that has yielded record-low ratings and sinking profits for the network's evening news broadcast.. While this latest Couric-related scuttlebutt may currently be nothing more than authoritatively packaged gossip, it should come as no surprise to anyone. It's no newsflashs that Ms. Couric's reign as nightly news anchor has been foundering. After seemingly endless hype building up to her debut back in 2006, she enjoyed a brief surge in ratings after which the numbers quickly dropped into the basement. All of her early initiatives to change the broadcast -- fireside chats, personal asides -- have been dropped and a traditional format has been re-adopted. So much of CBS's decision to bring Katie Couric onboard as the network's new post-Rather anchor seems to have been designed with the media, rather than the audience, in mind. And it played great to the media, which gleefully jumped at the chance to spin out countless stories -- from morning show to nightly news, from perkiness to gravitas, the first woman to anchor the network news, on and on. All that coverage, all that attention seems to have been assumed to reflect viewer interest and acceptance. But, what do you know, it didn't. Experts can point to the difficulties particular to CBS (its loss of affiliates, for instance) and commentators can quip that in this new online age no one watches the networks' nightly news. anymore. But maybe the problem is as simple as it appears to be: People just don't want to watch Katie Couric dispense their nightly news. Maybe celebrity appeal isn't as all-purpose and interchangeable as the media-corporate overlords want it to be and you can't just take the popular host of a bubbly morning entertainment/news-lite talk show and drop her behind the desk of the nightly news and expect her morning fans to fpllow and nightly-news viewers to flock. Since all of this upheaval speculation hinges on the presidential election, perhaps there's a lesson from that ratings race we can borrow in sorting this out. Maybe Katie Couric has something in common with Hillary Clinton: It's not that people don't want a woman to their anchor; they just don't want this woman to be their anchor. |
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