"I think one thing that I realized, looking back at it and analyzing it, is people are very unforgiving and very resistant to change," Couric told this week's New York magazine.Yeah, right. She came in, a bright new face, with new ideas on how to shake up the stodgy old evening news and people just aren't giving her a chance to show how much better it can be. Oh, and she isn't used to having to carefully budget each news presentation since she comes from the much more profitable entertainment side of TV. For some reason she doesn't understand why we news junkies just won't give her great new innovations a chance.
OK. I did give her a chance. I watched her show, in spite of the fact that I don't think she has a clue regarding how news is collected, evaluated, written and presented. She convinced me - that I was right. She really doesn't have a clue regarding what she is trying to do. She is an entertainer who has stepped far outside her appropriate realm, and she doesn't yet seem to realize it.
This is not a brand new complaint of mine. I have sent a letter to CBS News (My letter to Couric of CBS News posted Thursday, June 21, 2007) and my earlier complaint Someone tell CBS News. Katie Couric has to go, posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007.)
I am sure that for what she has done in the past Ms. Couric is an excellent professional. I wouldn't know. I have never watched her previous show. She is, however, getting long-in-the-tooth as a woman entertainer, and apparently thought that she could transfer her skills to a different form of media and extend her career beyond that normally available to women in TV entertainment. Unfortunately, for all her skills, Katie Couric clearly has no journalism experience. It shows. Her news judgment is simply inadequate to the job, and her understanding of what her audience wants from a news show is severely warped by both her lack of understanding of the news business and her success in the entertainment side of the TV business.
Her quoted comments from the interview show that she thinks she can lead the audience for the news into better realms. Sorry. One thing you would think she would understand about TV is that the issue is not what the TV leadership want to present that matters. It is what the audience wants to view that matters. I watch the news for the news, not for two minutes or more on the trails and tribulations of Paris Hilton in a twenty minute news show. That's gossip, not news.
News is a set of stories that provides me with facts that relate to judgments I have to make, particularly in the realms of politics, war and economics. I allot a certain amount of my to watch the news on TV. That is time that I will never get back. When someone takes part of that time to "entertain" me, they are wasting my irreplaceable time.
A good TV news person has long experience in determining what news is and how to effectively present it in a minimum amount of time. I depend on such people to give me what I want and not waste my irreplaceable time.
TV is very much unlike the newspapers, the news magazines or the Internet. The print media and the Internet can present me with an index of its offerings, which I then use to choose what I want to spend my time on. TV cannot do that, and Katie Couric does not have the skills needed to judge what should be presented as news and how it can best be presented. Couric is wasting my time.
This is my big complaint with CBS News and Katie Couric. Essentially, by making Katie Couric the CBS news anchor CBS has abandoned the news market - the audience for news - in that period of time.
It really is past time for Katie to go. Frankly, I doubt that I will switch back to CBS no matter what they do now. Well, one exception. If CBS News hired Lara Logan I would give her a chance. She is a professional news person.
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