Katie Couric’s Big Mistake
Every morning, my husband rushes around the house locating his Blackberry and his turkey sandwich before running out of the house for the 6:50 bus to Manhattan.
To avoid bodily harm, I wisely decide to stay out of his way. Instead, I pour
myself a cup of coffee and watch 15 minutes of the morning news shows.
Usually, I’ll flip back and forth between CBS and NBC. The shows are essentially
interchangeable. All of them feature perky people who will just as happily tell you about an up-coming storm, the latest in shoe fashion, and results of the
Michigan primary, without changing their chirpy intonation.
“In today’s news, a former Marine killed and torched a pregnant woman who had accused him of raping her. Speaking of killers, you are looking at a killer commute into the city today.”
At 7:05, I’ll reluctantly turn off the news and start toasting the waffles and packing lunches and fishing damp jeans out of the dryer to get the kids ready for school.
That 15 minutes of morning news is the only TV news that I will watch during the day. Of course, as a blogger and a political science professor, I’ll be consuming news all day long, but I’ll be mainlining my headlines via the Times website and Bloglines.
But the evening news? By the time the 6:30 network newscast rolls around to recap what I already know, I’ll be cooking, tutoring, chauffeuring. I’ll be yelling at kids to quit their computer programs and making them fold up their Taekwondo pajamas.
What won’t I be doing?
I will not be sitting in front of the 6:30 network news.
More importantly, neither will any of the college students in my classes.
They are the news consumers of the future and the evening news has no place in their lives. I teach Politics and Media with reading assignments from the most widely used textbook in the field, but the students don’t know what to make of it. To them, it reads like ancient history. The author writes as if the world still looked up to news anchors. She refers familiarly and respectfully to Brian Williams and Katie Couric in a tone that assumes her readers – the students – also worship them.
Wrong. The students worship Jon Stewart. They have never watched the 6:30 news, not even once. They have never watched the local 5:00 news shows either. I have to actually assign students to watch the local news in order to get the students to watch those shows, so they will know what their textbooks are talking about. I might as well have asked them to go to a museum.
My anecdotal evidence is supported by research. In a recent study, Thomas Patterson from Harvard found that young people – surprise! – don’t tune into Katie or any other traditional news anchors. They don’t have the same daily news habit that their parents had.
Patterson writes:
For young Americans, most of them do not make any appointment with the daily news, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have some exposure to it. They are so media connected that it’s really difficult for them or
anyone else in this society to not have some news exposure, but they
essentially don’t put part of their day aside to partake of the news.
Caitlin Flanagan, an author who is often the bane of much of the female blogosphere, has finally written an article for the Atlantic that most bloggers will agree with. She writes about the stupidity and miscalculation of Katie Couric’s move from the top-rated Today Show to the dinosaur of the evening news.
That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very
questions being asked. Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail-and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon. Because Katie remembered the old world, the one in which the most-respected news was broadcast at the end of the day, she thought that she was taking a more powerful
job. But the Today show-broadcast for four hours a day, a forum
for interviews with many of the top newsmakers of the day, as well as for the kind of lifestyle-trend stories it pioneered and that have come to play such a big part in the nightly news-is a far more culturally significant program. One reason that this huge star didn’t have a tell-all biography written about her until now is that while she was at Today, no publisher wanted to antagonize her; a booking on the show was every new author’s dream. The release of Klein’s splashy book,
then, is evidence not of Katie’s elevation, but of its opposite. She made the kind of mistake that women a generation younger than hers probably wouldn’t have. She spent her time gunning for a position that had been drained of its status and importance long before she got there. And what she has learned, the hard way, is that her climb to the top has been not a triumph but the act of someone who slept through a revolution.
Flanagan makes the important point that Couric was significantly more powerful as a personality on the Today show than she is on the Nightly News. The recent tell-all book about her life would never have been published if she was still Queen of the Morning. The bottom line is that she voluntarily took a career demotion by going to the evening news.
You want a powerful female personality? Behold at the mighty power of Oprah, Queen of the Afternoon! She can put books on the best seller list. She gives political campaigns a boost by showing up and doing the girl talk. She can get me to reorganize my closet. Awesome.
Couric’s ballyhooed likability has also been questioned lately. There have always been rumors that Couric doesn’t play well with others, and Matt Lauer still has the fresh honeymoon glow from Meredith Vieira. I didn’t bond with her like Flanagan did, but I never hated her. She seemed always seemed more approachable than Matt Lauer, who I imagine washing his hands after shaking hands with people. (I once sat one table over from Lauer, Bryant Gumbel, and their wives at a restaurant. Chilly city. They never spoke to each other through the meal.)
As Couric’s self-appointed career coach, I advise her to stop the botox, get off the sinking ship of the evening news, and go to work on her blog.
While I feel bad for Couric for making such a dumb move, I don’t mourn the end of network news. It was always staged and superficial. This news consumer loves that news production and commentary is so decentralized and open. The last viewers of the network news are one shuffleboard game away from extinction.
Laura McKenna is a political science professor who lives in New Jersey. She blogs at 11D.
I for one hope your analysis is wrong – but then again, that’s probably because I work supporting one of the 6:30pm news shows (well, and one of the Morning shows etc)
Looking at it from a semi-inside perspective of an IS/IT guy, the real pull these days IS the Morning show, and the Magazines – BUT (big but) the real RESPECT given by management and their peers is to the 6:30pm news
Why do you think Katie, Charles Gibson etc would leave the Morning shows or Magazines (Or in Gibson’s case – BOTH) to work that 30 minutes show? Two reasons – the respect of their peers, and the “The Evening News with XXX”
By the time you’re being considered by one of the “big 3″ networks for Anchor – you’ve made your $$$ – you have a whole lot of influence at work, and you’re being offered good $ for a job, where you no longer have to be at the office a 4:00am to get ready for the 7:00am show
True enough – nobody likes to wake up early, even for millions of dollars…
You’re absolutely correct. Evenings have become a rat race regardless of job or family. I can’t remember the last time I watched the evening news. Ithink the MSM puts these people on a pedastal because of who they were in the 60′s and 70′s but today newscasters are nobody. Most people today get their news from various sources on tv and the web. She probably regrets this and should be firing her manager.
http://mtaricani.blogspot.com/
I think the premise of this article is wrong. Katie Couric is a big screaming liberal who is incapable of thought.
Katie knew, she just knew that there was a glass ceiling in the Evening News, she knew that the vast sisterhood was being underserved by Big Media, and she knew that she could lead the sisters to information salvation. So, she made the move and now has a show indistinguishable from the rest of the dinosaurs.
Now I’m just spitballing here but if I sold the same product as you did with the only difference being my pitchwoman, and I knew that I’d be successful because of the sex of my pitchwoman then you’d, quite rightly, call me a sexist. See! I was right, Katie is a liberal! She’s a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the bigoted community.
But if she wants to save her show all she has to do is real news. All she has to do is set herself apart from the liberal media herd. Because, Katie dear, the rest of the country isn’t full of sexist bigots who’ll watch you simply because you’re a woman… it’s all about the product and your product, like your competitor’s, is crap.
The problem with nightly news is just that it really isn’t nightly as the rest of the country viewes it. Back in 1970 people really did work a 9-5 job. Slide in the car and be home by 6. Long enough for a martini and sit in the lounge chair.
Now? Most folks are doing a 9-6 or 10-8 kind of job. By the time most get home it’s well past 7pm. The news is over.
Yea,I feel real sorry for Katie and her multimillion dollar salary at CBS….poor thing…..she’s just another victim of a sexist,racist,privileged,white male audience that refuses to acknowledge her obvious self declared superior intellect and ability to read the news off a monitor….cry me a river
I graduated, as a Poly Sci major at, from pretty big NYC universtiry in 1970. I don’t recall students watching the evening news back then either.
You watched in once in a blue moon when there was nothing else to do or something big was going on.
Even as an adult, I’ve rarely seen the evening TV news. I don’t know one single person who does watch it. That includes my wife who was a producer in the DC bureau for ABC news for quite a few years.
I dunno, Curly, this looks like an on-the-money analysis to me. Good job.
I hadn’t stopped to think about it until reading your posting but I realize that I have never seen Couric on the nightly news. In fact, it has been years since I’ve turned on any of the network early evening news programs. I watch portions of the local morning news on the Providence NBC affiliate (because I like their morning news, not because of the network) to catch local weather and local news. At seven a.m. they switch to the Today show and my wife and I may watch a few opening minutes of that. After that our news comes mostly from the Internet, with some radio coverage (mostly “headline” news) and dtailed local news from newspapers.
Interesting analysis. However, I think you may have missed the biggest reason for the plummeting popularity of MSM evening news casts.
That is, they are premised upon the lie of Objectivity.
Back when my TV only got 3 channels, the left-leaning bias of Walter and Peter and Dan et al. wasn’t so obvious, and – with little to compare it against – those who pointed out that bias could be accused of paranoia.
But now, for example, Michael Medved eagerly reveals his right-wing Republican partisan bias throughout his 3 hour daily broadcast. Same for Rush, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, etc. Transparency is the rule in the new media (blogs, podcasts, talk radio), at least on the right and libertarian middle.
So when Katie Couric crashes the right-wing party that is talk radio by sneaking through the back door of interstitial “Notebook” commentary, and she predictably and reliably takes a left wing position on the day’s topic, her bias is as unsurprising as her denial of said bias is insulting.
And, because I don’t like lectures from smug liars, I hit the mute button.
If Katie copped to her obvious left wing bias, and encouraged contrary intelligent debate (another of the key differences between old & new media) from the other side, I’m confident that her ratings would quickly and dramatically rise. I would definitely tune in to a re-engineered Katie Couric show that transparently engaged the many facets of the day’s issues, and allowed me to chime in. Think of Brit Hume blended with Medved / Hewitt / Prager, etc.
If you want to save the evening news, Katie, I’ve just given you the formula.
In the meanwhile, I’ve gotta get back to reading the blogs on my PDA…
You know what makes me laugh like a drain? When they try to tease TV or radio news, like it’s 1974 or something. You know, “Tune in tonight to see a remarkable story from Wall Street.”
Dude, I read that twelve hours ago on Drudge! And if I hadn’t, I’d go look it up now. Stop pretending you’re the wellspring of all news!
“In today’s news, a former Marine killed and torched a pregnant woman who had accused him of raping her. Speaking of killers, you are looking at a killer commute into the city today.”
What’s up with the fake news headline that defames America’s military? Don’t you know these stories of crazed, homeless vets who can’t handle coming back to society are largely fabrications of the anti-war and attention-starved community? It’s time to lay this meme to rest.
This just fortifies my beliefs that voting requires a general knowledge about the players, the positions, and basic things like economics -the bill of rights – ,etc.
In ackowledging the fact that the media has failed in its second amendment responsibility to inform the voters, I support an objective test (English please)as a requirement to vote -proof of citizenship is essential to restore faith in the democratic process.
I am 47. I have never seen Katie’s evening newscast. I have never watched Brian Williams either. Come to think of it, I have not watched the evening national news programs in over 20 years. I do watch my local news a couple of time a week. The rest is from online sources and an occasional look at FOX and CNN from the hotel.
Oh, and Fidget… that is not a fake headline. Only the segue to the traffic report is potentially hypothetical.
There are still news programs? Who knew?
You speak of young people and college students, but I doubt there is a single man in this whole country below the age of 45 who EVER watches the evening news. Certainly I don’t nor does anyone I know. The difference is those of us above 40 may have actually seen a broadcast or two in decades past — we actually QUIT watching. I suspect a few more women watch it, but lord knows I can’t prove it.
And BTW, here in the vast Central time zone, the network news comes on at 5:30 pm. Seriously, almost no one with a full time job is at home that early, so what’s even the point?
My GenX wife watches Couric a few times each week and joke that she is skewering the demographics.
I worked Bryant Gumbel’s charity golf tourney about ten years ago. The only celebrity I saw him speak to all weekend was Yogi Berra.
Matt Lauer was there too and we was quite nice. He approached a group of us on the crew and talked with us freely.
Laura — your article, which uses the term “I” fourteen times, is more about yourself than Katie. That’s really sad. Think about it, girl.
How is making millions and millions of dollars making a “Mistake?”
She could retire now and be set for life.
It’s only a mistake because she’s not doing what you think she should be doing.
Who’s Katie Couric?
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I’m 60. I grew up watching the network news. I haven’t watched it for years. I don’t care if it’s Katie Couric or Walter Cronkite. If I wanted the news according to Howard Dean, I’d check in at the DNC website.
Young people watch Jon Stewart because he’s entertaining and his “news” content is about on par with the networks ( close to zero ). Only academics and other elitists watch anything other than entertainment on the traditional networks.
This all makes me wonder if the management at the Networks will be able to adapt the the new paradigm of all the best talent wanting to do the evening news and all the viewers wanting to watch the morning news. Those viewers, that is, who watch the news at all.
Considering the deciders here – network management – I’m going to guess that they fail utterly and continue to put all the money and contracts into the irrelevant evening news while further condescending to the preferences of their audience.
“Laura — your article, which uses the term “I” fourteen times, is more about yourself than Katie. That’s really sad. Think about it, girl.”
It’s called an ‘introductory anecdote.’
“How is making millions and millions of dollars making a “Mistake?”"
If making millions was the majority consideration for Katie Couric’s taking the job, then it was most certainly not a “Mistake.” However, whatever she was thinking, I doubt she would consider a forced retirement and complete irrelevance in a completely irrelevant format a “Success.”
My wife (who’s in media) and I both thought from the moment Couric was announced as the CBS anchor that CBS did it because it got her off the Today show, not because they thought she’d improve the CBS Evening News. They know the evening news business is sinking, and the morning talk/news shows are much bigger business.
Isn’t Jon Stewart’s “you’re hurting America” thing coming to hunt him back? if he is considered a semi-credible news source nowadays, isn’t he the one Hurting America? Do all people who watch his show, who obviously do not watch any other news show, take care to be updated online?
True story: Two weeks ago a guest speaker (age 60-ish) asked my HS Am.Gov. class “How many of you read a newspaper every day or news magazine every week?” No one raised their hand, so he launched into the premise that they are all lazy and uninformed.
He never even asked if they get news anywhere else, esp. online.
Generational ships passing in the night.
I’d imagine that college students watch YouTube and if Katie was worth her salt, she’d be all over YouTube with high ratings; i.e. think “Anderson Cooper” and “Keith Olbermann.”
I believe that Katie was given the job to take eyeballs away from Faux News;
i.e. she immediately featured President Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and “Thomas Friedman.”
so, if you’re a “katie fan”– and now she’s trying to make war and globalization sound good– instead of having “mindless fun with Tupperware”, i think you’d stop watching too!
and folks like me wouldn’t start watching her because she “repackages worn out talking points.”
Well-documented and correct.
However, I’d rather them watch Couric and Williams than the fool John Stewart. He is clearly why our collegians are so silly, hedonistic, clueless and support Barack Hussein Obama.
Smitty, great job slipping “Faux News” in there! Unfortunately, CBS News can’t even beat syndicated reruns. And Fox shows better legs than Katie ever did on Today!
“And Fox shows better legs than Katie ever did on Today!”
Yes, I didn’t want anyone to say “that guys sexist” so I didn’t talk about those Fauxy Ladies over at Fox.
In general, I think that Katie should have chosen a better role model, someone like Helen Thomas! Instead, she tried to compete against a bunch women who would do and say anything for money.