When Katie Couric was tapped to anchor CBS Evening News, many considered it an attempt to “reinvigorate” television news. It’s fairly evident that it wasn’t successful in the way it was perhaps intended to be (both ABC and NBC are ahead of CBS in terms of nightly news viewers). However, Couric’s future remains bright as she has both a solid journalistic history (who could forget the infamous Tina Fey Palin interview?) and has tapped into new directions such as her webshow @katiecouric. Yup, perhaps the time for “anchorwomen” truly has come.
This past spring, CBS News president Sean McManus and executive vice-president Paul Friedman discussed whether to try to bring an end to what may be the last great experiment in network news: Katie Couric, anchorwoman. Though her reported $15 million annual contract is not up until next June, one idea that was floated was for CBS to buy out the remainder of Couric’s contract this September and put in someone new this fall, according to people familiar with the conversation. Executives were perhaps also concerned about the bad publicity that might result from a long contract negotiation with Couric, especially if she ended up leaving. McManus didn’t want to make an early move, and CBS CEO Leslie Moonves was also against moving so quickly. “Leslie is incredibly supportive,” one person familiar with Moonves’s thinking explained. “Moonves and Katie have an excellent relationship.”
One thing that I can’t help considering is who they would put in as a new anchor should Couric get the golden handshake. It’s going to be interesting in terms of feminism no matter what; if they replace Couric with a man (and correspondent Scott Pelley is the name most often thrown around at the moment), the message is going to be that, as a woman, she couldn’t hack it. If they put another female into the anchor chair, it’s possible that outcries of “She only got the job because …
This just in (sorry, had to do it): Diane Sawyer is taking over Charles Gibson’s role as anchor at ABC’s nightly news program, World News. Gibson announced this morning that he would retire from ABC and World News where he served as the lead anchor since 2006, by the end of this year. His replacement? Longtime Good Morning America anchor Diane Sawyer. This makes Sawyer the second female anchor in a major network’s evening news broadcast following Katie Couric’s current stint at NBC’s Nightly News. This also means that two out of three major network’s evening news broadcasts will now be anchored by women. So, yay, feminism, right? Two ladies serving as anchors at network nightly news programs! The only problem is, the network nightly news isn’t what it used to be. While being the anchor of a network nightly news program was once considered one of the most prestigious positions for a television journalist to take, not that many people care about the nightly news anymore.