The Katie Couric Blunder

The Katie Couric Blunder

John LeBoutillier
Monday, July 9, 2007

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Here is the latest sign of the total disintegration of Katie Couric and her version of the once-famed "CBS Evening News": she is admitting to "slapping" a staffer over his insertion of the word "sputum" into a June story about the tuberculosis scare.

While Couric and CBS execs try to paper this over with claims that she was "only joking," it peels away yet another layer of the ongoing journalistic and economic disaster CBS has made with her hiring 15 months ago at a whopping $22 million per year salary.

If we were at Harvard Business School, the Couric-to-CBS News story would be a case study in how to misread your market and your audience.

Some facts:

CBS has invested huge money in this experiment.

Between her salary, promotion, a new set ($10 million) and lost revenues, this has already cost CBS over $100 million.

Under interim anchor Bob Schieffer, "The CBS Evening News" was indeed in third place — but was making steady gains back after the Dan Rather debacle. Couric has lost those gains and is now the lowest rated third-place anchor in over 20 years.

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In a New York Magazine article out today, she claims the problem is the viewers! She explains her dismal ratings this way: "People are unforgiving and resistant to change."

She conveniently ignores the fact that on her opening night last September, after three months of unrelenting CBS promotion, she had over 13 million people watching! Resistant to change? They tuned in to see this change and right away the next day her ratings began to deteriorate — and have steadily declined weekly ever since.

In other words, the viewers were open-minded about this new broadcast and new anchor they had been promised. But alas, it failed to hold their loyalty. Soon viewers drifted off to Charlie Gibson at ABC News — who got none of the publicity or promotion (or salary) that Couric got.

So why does Gibson/ABC News work and Couric/CBS News not work? Simple: He is a veteran, legitimate journalist who cut his teeth doing hard news for decades. When he talks about something, you listen. Katie cut her teeth in this new "infotainment" world of the Today show where she did fluffy features laced with humor and self-mockery. Yes, she was enormously popular in that venue — and Today's ratings have declined without her.

CBS made a fundamental miscalculation: they thought Katie could bring with her the morning audience of young women (ages 25-45) who advertisers target. But these women nowadays are not home at 6:30 p.m. to watch TV news. Yes, these women were devoted to Katie at 7 a.m. — but they won't/can't/haven't altered their TV viewing habits to watch her at 6:30 p.m.

Along with that fundamental screw-up by CBS, they also didn't realize something else: She is no good at reading from a teleprompter. She just doesn't do it well. Her strength on TV was the ad-libbed back-and-forth with Matt Lauer. But evening news is serious business - and is not conducive to her humorous banter. So, along with her/their inability to bring the morning female audience with her to the evenings, she has systematically alienated the traditional, i.e., older, evening news audience.

No wonder she is a distant third place these days. And there is no hope of gaining any of her lost audience back; evening news viewers gave her a chance and she failed. Period. Now the only question left is how and when CBS gets rid of her.

You can bet your bippy that CBS big shots — the same fools who lured her over in the first place — already are planning on her replacement. Their problem is that CBS News' bench is thin, and they also don't know what to do anymore.

Do they go back to a "boring, steady, white older guy" in the Schieffer/Gibson mode? Harry Smith perhaps? Or do they try another shocker — an African American man or another woman (Diane Sawyer perhaps)?

You also can bet CBS execs' careers are on the line for this massive blunder, and that plays into who gets rid of her and who takes the fall for this.

Do they try to make her co-anchor their-always-failing "CBS Morning Show?" Do they give her an afternoon talk show or a night-time magazine show for the remaining years of her exorbitant contract?

All of this is soon to play out. It is one of the biggest screw-ups — ever — in TV news. They never understood their audience or the newer audience they were attracting. And they didn't understand their new anchor either.

This will cost everyone involved — big time.

Prediction: she doesn't make it past this coming Christmas/New Year's Holidays.

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