America's Sweetheart. Katie Couric? No, try Joe Hagan.
The Cable Gamer will admit that she's had a crush on Joe Hagan--on his mind, of course!--ever since he started covering the media for The New York Observer. My heart followed him to The Wall Street Journal for a spell, and now to New Yorkmagazine.
But enough my Joe. Let's talk about why he hot, yet again, for his
sizzling profile of Katie Couric. So let me count the ways:
First, she disses her fans pretty good, all on the record. OK, her ratings are down, to as few as 5.5 million on some nights, but her trashing her audience is not the way to make her ratings go up. She bluntly refers to her fans this way: "People are very unforgiving and resistant to change."
Second, she's a drama queen. Speaking of her "vulnerabilities," she describes herself in the third person singular, as seen by her "Day of the Locust"-like fans: "This person who's been so successful isn't so great, and finally she's been put in her place--that kind of mentality. I think it's fairly primal." In other words, the lizard-brained brute fans out there want to see their pale White Princess ritually sacrificed. That's not how you see yourself, dear TV viewer? As a primal slaughterer of your betters? Well, too bad! Cuz that's how Katie sees you.
Third, she expresses open disappointment in CBS prexy Les Moonves--that's generally a no-no. As she says, "We're in the midst of such a major shift in how we consume information that even a brilliant guy like Les Moonves doesn't have all the answers." That's kinda damning with faint praise. Moonves could have softened the impact of Couric's words by accepting some of the blame, in the sense of "we're all learning here," but Couric's boss isn't so forgiving. He told Hagan that he accepts no blame, zero. Leaving Katie's words, gently trashing him, to simply sit out there, for public inspection, forever.
Fourth, she reveals a dark side, underneath that perky streak. She goes way beyond saying that she has had second thoughts, all the way to saying, "I think it bugs people even more that I'm not a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, It's probably disappointing to some poeple." Ooh. And yet, keenly aware of her own centrality in her own self-generated script, Couric adds, "Because in the arc of the story, that's what they want to see." In case people don't get the full flavor, she refers to her own "casual evisceration" in the press. Ouch!
Fifth, and speaking of the press, she blames Bob Schieffer for leaking a nasty story about Couric's alleged impending demise to Gail Shister of The Philadelphia Inquirer. And maybe she blames Leslie Stahl, too.
Sixth, she might be getting paid as much as $22 million a year, not just the chump-change-y $15 million that's been earlier reported.
Seventh, she swears, as in obscenities.
Eight, the ring tone on her cell phone is "Don't Cha (Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me)."
Dish and gossip aside--not that there's anything wrong with either!--Katie Couric and the story of "CBS Evening News" is interesting to Cable Gamers, of course, for the same reason that radio is interesting to CGers. And for the same reason that iPods and iPhones and Google are interesting to us here at TCG--because it's all Converging.
Yet broadcast TV seems to be the last to understand that the real heart of the Cable Game is not cable, its choice! The reason we like cable news is that it's on all the time, that it's got lots of variety, that it's backed up by ever-improving websites, and that it's continuing to evolve to meet new needs, such as content specially designated for cell phones. CBS, the most dinosaur-like of the former "Big Three" networks, is belatedly moving in that new-media direction; it's now possible, for example, to watch the entire "CBS Evening News" online.
And yet even thought Moonves publicly promised to "blow up" the evening-news format when Couric came over last fall, he didn't do it--couldn't do it. As Joe explains, 22 minutes is just too short for the news these days; even a three-minute interview, a format at which Couric traditionally excels, stretches out too long to fit into such a time-straitjacket. Seems to me that Couric and Moonves should have thought of that constraint issue before they made bold claims they couldn't keep. Oh well.
All in all, a really informative interview.
PS: Joe, you know where to find me!
