Nothing To Smile About

Broadcasting & Cable offers an analysis of changes at the news desk six weeks into Katie Couric's tenure at CBS Evening News. It's fascinating:

[S]ince Couric's arrival, women have received 40% fewer assignments than they did under her predecessor, Bob Schieffer. Men, meanwhile, have seen no cutback in their workload. The paucity of female correspondents is one result of an array of changes to the content, form and presentation of the newscast instituted under Couric. Those changes amount to two main differences in the new Evening News.

First, some hard, breaking news has been supplanted by features/interviews/commentary. The "Story of the Day" averages 18% less time than it did under Schieffer, who used to run one soft (human-interest, celebrity) feature for every three on a hard topic. Under Couric, the ratio is one to two. Moreover, the new nightly feature, freeSpeech, devotes 90 seconds to guest commentary.

I'd read that Couric was shortchanging hard news, but this seemed natural enough to me, who has a dim view of broadcast TV news: People go to the Internet for the hard news, and Katie Couric for the smile and the latest on [cleverly abbreviated couple]. But that's not a totally founded view, I think. There's a sizeable proportion of people who still depend on the nightly news for information, and those people are increasingly turning to the Internet for . . . pr0n. I poked around on the Congressional Internet Caucus site and, well, didn't find the report I looked at a while ago, which suggested that the increase in news-net use is a mere fraction of the increase in YouTube and other entertainment-net uses. The anchors are still gatekeepers.

Whatever else her tenure means, Couric seems to be keeping her sisters at CBS down:

Second, the role of the anchor has been emphasized; the role of the correspondent downplayed. That change is evident right at the top of the newscast when the day's major stories are teased.

Whereas Schieffer had his correspondents introduce their own stories, Couric does all the teasing herself. She also has 20% more voiceover time than he did. Couric cedes time for the freeSpeech segment to a CBS News colleague only once a week, when Schieffer himself offers a regular commentary on Wednesday; on the other four days, we hear a guest.

The upshot of all these changes is that stories filed by correspondents account for just 69% of Couric's news hole, compared with 85% under Schieffer. And the brunt of that cutback has been borne almost entirely by CBS' female correspondents.

Maybe the changes explain why Couric's show has taken a drubbing in the ratings. Already the show is cutting its nightly opinion segment, but the report doesn't say anything about what the new mix will look like, or whether it will include more roles for women broadcasters.

Posted by Kriston at November 20, 2006 8:16 PM