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Katie Couric: yesterday’s news
CBS’s news anchor is being thrown over board in the face of competition from the internet
Katie Couric's was the face that America loved to wake up to. For more than 15 years she starred on the morning TV show Today with ratings that left her broadcast rivals green. She had blonde hair in a good-girl bob, wide eyes, a pert gummy smile and, for a bonus, great legs. She had a nice, chatty way of delivering news and morning drivel.
But now Couric is making headlines as the Last Face of Broadcast News. Once she was credited with one of the major breakthroughs of modern journalism: when technicians cut away the front of her desk to display those legs, and audience ratings shot up. But the pert smile is fading. Couric, 51, is about to be fired.
It is not all her fault. No less a figure than Don Hewitt, the CBS producer who coined the term 'anchor' as he moulded the great Walter Cronkite into 'the most trusted man in America', is predicting that the whole game is up.
Couric sits in Cronkite's old chair anchoring the CBS evening news. She got the job 18 months ago when Dan Rather, an Old White Guy, got fired for using false documents to report that Dubya Bush had gone officially AWOL from his National Guard duties. Couric, CBS thought, would lighten things up and get the audience back. She was the first woman solo news anchor and her bosses agreed to pay her a whacking $15m a year.
But her ratings have plunged from 10m to fewer than 6m. Hewitt, now 85, watched them tumble and told an award ceremony that it was the end of an era. "There are no more Cronkites," he said. He agreed that there was more to it than that: the era of cable and then internet news had more or less done for national broadcast news anyway. He suggested that the big names might have a future back in their local towns: "In most cities the local anchor is the local celebrity."
Katie tried everything: empathetic interviews, witty comments, showing more leg. She changed suits and tried going back to solemn intonation. That didn't work either. Once, working at the Washington bureau, she had won an Emmy for journalism, so it wasn't that she was dumb.
A terrible event in her private life may offer a clue. After years of singleton blonde ambition, Couric married and had two daughters in 1991 and 1996. In 1998, her husband died of cancer. Couric was left a widow with two little girls and handled the tragedy with consummate dignity. This transformed her from TV journalist to a national star - something like, but not quite, Oprah Winfrey.
It was that which CBS News was trying to exploit, and they got it wrong. Americans did not want to watch Couric presenting the evening news. Her fate proves that there are limits to all-purpose celebrity appeal. Bring back Walter Cronkite, and don't bother with the botox or the hair rug. ·
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The king is dead; the queen didn't live long! So much for America's proclivity for packaging.
It's about time she's leaving!
What I want in an anchor is Honesty and I don't want a biased person. I want an interviewer who is tough when it comes to asking questions NOT asking fluff!
Couric was tough only on the fluff when she interviewd Hillary Clinton, but let BUSH slide, with assinine questions that she just let him answer and she never even questioned him on his answers. That is one interview I'll Never forget!
She interviewed Hillary Clinton twice and twice she hammered her on her Upbeat attitude, not one time during the interview but several times, as if Hillarys upbeat attitude was The MOST important thing in this candidates agenda!
GET RID OF KATIE I YELLED and somehow CBS heard me, well actually heard more than me! Send her back to Matt!
Couric never had a chance, really. She was fine as host of a lightweight breakfast show. But viewers in most countries prefer their news presented by someone with genuine gravitas. And that, in 19 cases out of 20, means a man. Women simply are not perceived as having that sort of weight on air. They're still sex objects -- witness CBS's action in giving exposure not to the news but Couric's legs. That alone was a kiss of death because viewers aren't fools. Even more to the point, though, is that she has been sitting in a chair occupied for so long by one of America's genuine (and few) national institutions, Walter Cronkite. Many. many people remember, and revere, him. He took the art of news anchoring to a level unmatched by anyone before or since. Couric was never going to live up to that although Dan Rather did pretty well before his unfortunate contretemps. As for Couric being a victim of electronic progress, I reckon the real answer is that she simply wasn't good enough. Nearly, perhaps, but not quite.