CBS, Katie Couric Seek New Direction

When CBS President Les Moonves hired Katie Couric away from NBC’s Good Morning America to anchor the CBS Evening News, some saw it as a daring experiment in gender equality, others as a foolish attempt to transform a morning personality into a serious journalist.

With CBS trailing ABC and NBC in the critical evening news ratings, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz believes that Couric will be out of the anchor chair within the year. Couric’s broadcast has been attracting around six million viewers (and falling) compared to a steady or growing eight to nine million for ABC’s Charles Gibson and NBC’s Brian Williams.

The television industry grapevine is trembling with rumors about Couric’s future and her potential successor.

Couric is signalling that she’d prefer a return to the kind of interview-oriented, personality-driven programming that made her a morning news superstar at NBC. “It’s really hard to show that side of my personality on the evening news, and that’s a frustration for me,” she told Kurtz.

With a $75 million dollar contract that began in September of 2006 at stake, CBS is unlikely to let Couric go despite conjecture that she could move to CNN to replace Larry King. The most likely scenarios: Couric moving to 60 Minutes, returning to morning news on CBS’s Early Show, or starting over with a syndicated talk show.

Wherever Couric is headed, the flurry of news about her departure from the CBS Evening News is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. She’s unlikely to last beyond the November election and may be out as early as this June.

Newsprism