Throughout broadcast news history, CBS has an incredibly impressive track record. Edward R. Murrow is one of the best examples of journalistic integrity and groundbreaking newsmaking. 60 Minutes is one of the most distinguished and popular television show of all time, let alone TV news show.
Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer are all venerable institutions in the world of major network broadcast news. Sure, there was the flap over Bush’s National Guard documents, but everyone seems to forget that the facts of the overall story itself were never denied by anyone associated with the Bush administration. By and large, for decades, CBS News was viewed as the place to go for an example of journalistic integrity.
And now, CBS is on the verge of throwing away over six decades of its’ good name and reputation – all based on trying to increase ratings by hiring a “personality” as opposed to a serious newsperson to anchor and be the face of its’ flagship news operation. The irony here, of course, is that within six weeks of her first broadcast, Couric’s viewership was lower than Flavor Flav’s VH1 show, and has basically been in third place consistently over the past six months.
Now, it certainly isn’t the fact that there are no women who would make excellent anchors for the evening news. Take Christiane Amanpour, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and Lara Logan. Hell, even Elizabeth Vargas did a credible job filling in for Bob Woodruff. Any of these would be a tremendous step up, and I am sure there are many others who I didn’t even think of off the top of my head.
But, the “Great Katie experiment” has quickly not only become a tremendous failure any way you want to measure it, but it has also done what nothing before could do – threaten to completely ruin the CBS News brand of quality journalism and rebrand CBS as lazy journalism.
Just in the past couple of weeks, we have seen an incredible amount of puff, spin, lies, plagiarism, right wing talking points and lack of journalistic integrity from the very desk that defined journalistic integrity. A very brief recap of the more major offenses:
- Fearmongering, innuendo and repeating lies about Barack Obama’s upbringing;
- Potential plagiarism with respect to “Katie Couric’s Notebook”; and
- The absolute disgrace and disrespect shown towards John and Elizabeth Edwards in a 60 Minutes interview.
A longer and more damning list of her “credentials” is here at MediaMatters (hat tip to HollywoodOz for his round up of her history).
Couric is clearly not ready for prime time. She probably never was and never will be ready to be that serious journalist – the one biggest criteria and requirement to be a television news anchor. There is a place for people with her “skill set”. Network news is most certainly not that place.
FoxNews is one of those places. Some of the other cable “news” channels may also be appropriate. The Today Show and Good Morning America could also apply, although “there were many who said” Katie was wearing out her welcome there before she was offered the CBS job (how’s that for good sourcing?).
Clearly, this was a ratings ploy. Clearly, that did not go over nearly as planned. CBS is not only still in third place, but they are way behind in the ratings, and are viewed as a lightweight compared to NBC’s Brian Williams and ABC’s Charles Gibson. CBS Evening News has ceased to be relevant – and has ceased to even be news.
Do yourselves a favor, CBS – buy out this contract, admit the error, move on and get back to doing what your news division is supposed to be doing.
Start delivering the news again.
also in orange
They won’t do it. Too much invested in her. Besides, I honestly believe she is following the dictates of her bosses. She’s giving them what they want her to deliver. Absent an Imus type incident, which she’s too clever and circumspect to ever create, she’ll be there until the bosses can no longer tolerate her poor ratings. That’s the way to get rid of her. Tell people to stop watching her. Call her on her lies, her dissemination of propaganda, and spread the word: Don’t Watch the CBS News with Katy Couric.
I am only one story so I cannot make a case for significance out of my personal reactions. However, I seem to sense these things early. I watched Fox when they first came out, and soon could not stand it as a news organization because of the obvious slants and propaganda. It made/makes me angry that they seemed to be succeeding as a news outlet.
Well for most of the last 40 years, I have watched the CBS evening news! However, after two weeks of Katie, no more, and for the same reason as my Fox exit. This is not straight news with internal investigations, but pre-determined propaganda slants. Too bad, but it does seem to be an indication of a larger American news problem, and one with consequences for a needed informed electorate!
Smarten up CBS, replace Couric with Mika Brzezinski.
The link here doesn’t work, so I’m not sure whether your comment was ironic or straightforward. But Mika Brzezinski was responsible for one of the most egregious pieces of Republican campaign deception CBS News put out around the Republican National Convention.
Brzezinski interviewed a “man in the street,” Dennis Cariello, on the subject of Bush’s tax cuts. Cariello was enthusiastic, and she quoted him extensively.
After her piece ran, and after it was excerpted in other CBS News pieces, it came out that Cariello was also an executive-level NY State Republican Party operative and in fact that his name and photo were prominently posted on the RNC website, welcoming Republicans to the Convention.
CBS quietly put a short disclaimer on the web version of Brzezinski’s story about two weeks later, IIRC — long after the segment had run and had been picked up for use in other CBS News stories. As far as I know they never responded in any other way to the concerns that were expressed at the time, and they never explained how it was that Brzezinski just happened to interview Cariello, nor how she it came about that she neglected to disclose his highly-relevant background.
IMO, Brzezinski would be an inspired choice.
At Fox News.
With kind regards,
Dog, etc.
searching for home
My father was a huge CBS News fan. He watched it religiously, and was well informed, compared to most Americans (he also read the paper just as diligently).
He died last May, at 86, and I’m glad he didn’t live to see this, because it would have broken his heart.
Bring back Dan Rather, establish CBS as a real news organization again. Open the investigation about the AWOL TNG idiot-in-chief again. Please. Mr. Rather paid his dues and proved his worth early in his career. To have it destroyed because of the sensibilities and the outright lies of the right-wing buttholes makes me want to become a radical. The time is now. I ain’t that damned old.
Did Morrow or Cronkite or Rather ever shy away from investigating and reporting the real story?? Not unfortunately until the 21st century when the corporate interests simply pulled the plug. Morrow is rolling in his grave, Cronkite is pissed and has stated his views, and Rather is still out there somewhere.
Now that I have smoke coming out of my ears I’ll take a break, but somehow, someway the art of journalism needs to come back for the preserverance of our damned constitution.
Dan Rather wanted Lara Logan to replace him. I agree. She is a top notch journalist.
katie couric and journalist are not words that have any relationship to one another.
broadcast journalism is dead…has been for a very long time…bill moyers was the last living example, and he was unceremoniously eliminated.
lose the tv clammy…there’s no journalism there any longer.
I’ve not watched a single minute of her since that fluffy little interview with Bush when he just “had no way of knowing the levees would break.”
CBS is looking to be safe. They don’t want to be straight up right wing the way Fox is at a time when more and more people are waking up to what Fox is really all about. But at the same time, they are brave enough to challenge that sort of agenda, either. They are giving what they think most Americans want, and that’s fluff. And I think in a way they might be right. I’m amazed at how many people I know from work or even in my family who just don’t want to hear the truth. Because even though they spend the majority of their time ignoring the truth or avoiding the truth, they still feel they hear too much of it.
Oops. I meant to say they aren’t brave enough. Heh.
Nope. CBS’ selection of Couric was no accident.
CBS doesn’t want its news ratings to go up.
Say what?
You read correctly: CBS doesn’t want its news ratings to go up.
CBS wants low news ratings. Ratings are what gives programmes value in the broadcast industry, after all. Low ratings devalue the news further in the eyes of corporate executives, thereby making them less likely to commit resources into serious news reporting, and more money into entertainment and “infotainment”. Entertainment programmes cost money but make even more, while “infotainment” pieces are cheap and easy.
It’s about the ratings, stupid (as Dan Rather once said).
Not only that, but hard-hitting investigative journalism makes corporate sponsors (advertisers) uncomfortable and discomfits the government, as well. The federal government in particular has been very generous to the television industry, selling the right to the public airwaves at bargain basement prices and lifting the restrictions on media consolidation that were also a barrier to further profit-taking.
I can write the script for the CBS meeting that slashes the news budget even further:
“We’ve tried everything…we even hired Katie Couric to be the evening news anchor and the ratings STILL tanked. I tell you, there’s no point in throwing more money into a rathole.”
Katie Couric will have a long career as the CBS news anchor. Katie is right where she is intended to be.
Katie Couric ain’t one of them.
I doubt that Amanpour would take a network anchor gig; the suits wouldn’t give her the control over the content of the broadcast (she’d insist on REAL journalism) that she’d both want and need.
That’s the problem: the person bested suited for the “anchor” job is Ted Baxter (for you older folks) or Ron Burgundy (for you younger crowd).
In England, the “anchors” are more properly labelled “newsreaders”, which is what they are.
Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather were both journalists (Rather still is…in fact, that’s what got him sacked), but they were anomalies rather than the rule. The era of Journalist Anchor is gone; the era of Newsreader with Nice Teeth has arrived.
Like Ron Burgundy, Katie Couric will read whatever’s on the cue cards or teleprompter. And so it goes.
I couldn’t stand her from the moment she took over for Jane Pauley on the Today show (NBC’s morning show).
I do know that Couric is smarter than she’s often given credit for, and that she hated having to do all the traditional “women’s news” stories on morning TV (weight-loss, gift-buying, etc.) and was insulted by that. So I felt she deserved a shot.
But she’s failed. Completely.
That said, I thought Peter Jennings failed completely when he shilled for the government in the most brazenly dishonest show on the JFK assassination done to date, and that’s REALLY saying something because most of them have all been pretty bad. But what made his so much worse is how much more is known, provably documented now, that he ignored in the making of his report.
And Dan Rather was no better on that issue, even though off the record he admitted to researchers that “CBS got it wrong” on the Kennedy assassination.
So should Katie go?
Why?
She’s a perfect symbol of the news today. All style and no substance. I’d rather have her because she so obviously reminds us why we shouldn’t be watching than someone like Brian Williams, whose handsome good looks and sincere delivery more successfully mask the propaganda he too serves up on a daily basis.
Nah. Leave Katie there. I mean, she’s no Edward Murrow, but none of them are, or have even come close since before the Cold War. Couric’s no Imus. She hasn’t done anything wrong.
That she’s incompetent should not be our concern. Why are any of us still watching evening news in the first place?
is NOT a journalist.
She’s a complete suck up.