Other Matters: The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric

I spent twenty-four years in television news, fourteen of them in front of the camera and reporting, then managing news operations, so I was compelled to watch the debut of The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric. If the dumbing-down cycle that began thirty years ago when WABC-TV hired Geraldo Rivera is not complete, let us shudder in anticipation.
We got exclusive pictures of Vanity Fair‘s exclusive pictures of the babyTom Cruise had with his latest woman, equating them with the importance of CBS’s coverage decades ago of the birth of Prince Charles. This sort of tabloid item, nestled among commercials for products designed to bolster failing body parts of the aging, is evidently the approach CBS hopes will attract younger viewers.
There was a free speech segment featuring a movie director analyzing political civility, tagged with a promise from Couric that Rush Limbaugh would be in that slot on Thursday. Lara Logan did a solid report on the Taliban in Afghanistan, Anthony Mason a good one on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The producers embellished President Bush’s speech comparing the war on terror with the runup to World War Two. They flew in rear screen photos of Hitler and Mussolini, Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders, bolstering the President’s points rather than simply running clips and letting him speak for himself. It was a blatant abandonment of objectivity for the sake of production “values.” Of course, there was yet another story about the death of the Australian crocodile hunter. CBS News provided Tom Friedman of The New York Times a platform, in the guise of an interview by Couric, to give his thoughts on the administration’s policy for the Middle East, with no tough questions and no counterbalancing view from another quarter. I don’t know how much of the CBS News budget went to the eminent film composer James Horner for the ten-second opening theme, but I can’t remember one note of it. I was amused to read in The Wall Street Journal that when he was approached by CBS about the project, Horner told them he didn’t know who Katie Couric was and didn’t watch much television.
There were three plugs to go to CBS.com, tell them your opinions and suggest a closing line for Couric. For $15,00,000 a year you want a Marilyn Monroe impersonator AND a way to say goodnight? Of course, if she had a closer, there would be no reason to ask viewers yet again to go to the website and suggest one, and that would mean the loss of a marketing opportunity, the true purpose of a network news broadcast. I would have taken the gig for a million and used the other $14,000,000 to cover the news. Is it too late?
And how about Couric’s authoritative opening line: “Hi, everyone.”
The News Hour With Jim Lehrer on PBS had more news in the five-minute opening summary than CBS managed in the entire 22 minutes of news time in its half hour. Support PBS. Please.
Good night and good luck.