I confess to having paid very little attention to Katie Couric. Maybe it really is because I am at heart a digusting, unrepentant misogynist. Or maybe — just maybe — I like a certain gravity of bona fides in my network news readers. Knowing a bit about CBS president, Les Moonves, from having observed his steady climb through CBS entertainment to his current lofty perch as CEO of CBS, the courtship of Katie and her investiture in Dan Rather’s chair is just so perfectly in keeping with the Moonves ethos.
Moonves is an extraordinarily facile corporate player, a former actor with a normally shrewd ear for consumer trends and audience tastes … at least in entertainment. In the aftermath of the Rather implosion, a debacle fueled by a combination of overreaching and Swift Boating, Moonves calculated that America would accept a performer instead of another globe-trotting warhorse easily tarred as a sympathizer of one sort or another.
It appears Moonves was wrong. According to Gail Shister’s story, now heatedly and personally disputed by CBS top dogs Sean McManus and Rick Kaplan, Couric already has one leg swinging over the abyss — at the bottom of which is an “upgraded” reassignment to “48 Hours Mysteries” or CBS’s “The Early Show”. (Wait … is that mongrel still on? Let me check. … OK. Yes.)
If Shister’s telling can be trusted — and I’ll trust her before I trust Couric’s protecting suits — Couric has not played well with CBS’s warhorses, which, I am not too modest to say, is exactly what I predicted would happen.
Within every network news division there still exists a proud and very wary core of veterans. Primaery among these are reporters who have actually covered this planet’s myriad horrors in person, as opposed to interviewing the survivors on a Manhattan couch two weeks later. THAT crowd was always going to be Couric’s biggest challenge. The Bob Schieffers, “Baghdad Bob” Simons, etc. are wily old bulls with, dare I say, every right to have a hard-on for cutie-pie pretenders.
Their animus likely worsens when the cutie-pie isn’t just popping up in field reports on the evening news, but anchoring the damn thing, and representing all of them at three or four times the money they’re making … simultaneous with Moonves and McManus slicing out overseas bureaus, travel budgets and generally de-contenting the brand they’ve worked for decades to imbue with Big “J” journalistic honor.
The inside-baseball irony here is that Shister, who was recently “reassigned” from the regular, tough and very distinctive media reporting she has done for 20-plus years to “TV trend features” by her new bosses at the Philadelphia Inquirer, (which went from Knight-Ridder ownership, to McClatchy, to a very Star Tribune-like private investor group called Philadelphia Media Holdings), is fighting essentially the same battle as the old CBS warhorses … who appear to be her sources for her Couric story.
The same dumbing down that sees marketplace wisdom in yanking someone like Shister away from reporting and interpreting news among America’s media elites to friggin’ “trend” stories on, I don’t know what, Sanjaya’s second act, is eroding the value of both newspapers and TV news. And by “value” we mean value to existing, regular consumers, not value to a presumptive “young adult” audience that doesn’t give a damn about anything other than who Simon Cowell sneers at next, or who only recognizes Katie Couric from all the free publicity she’s gotten from the supermarket tabloids.
Oh, don’t get me started.
But let me suggest to CBS, Moonves and McManus that if they still want to play a glamour card on the evening news anchor desk, but next time with some actual street-level, smoke-and-cordite reporting crede, they could do worse than try out Lara Logan.
I’d pay more attention.
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