SHE showed up the day after Labor Day in a white jacket and asked viewers to give her a signoff to call her own.
Not exactly an auspicious beginning-but not a disaster, either.
So, a month into the most-hyped makeover, featuring the most expensive anchor in TV history, has Katie Couric delivered the goods?
The good news, announced earlier this week is that 49-year-old Katie has brought in more of the audience most desired by the news shows (25- to 54-year-olds) than either NBC or ABC.
The bad news is that “The CBS Evening News” is back in third place.
The biggest news is that, in an attempt to change “The CBS Evening News” from your mother’s newscast to your daughter’s, it has morphed from a newscast into a magazine-the perfect lead-in for “Entertainment Tonight.” This is never more evident than when the night’s lead story is hard-hitting.
To her credit, Katie’s newscast doesn’t pretend the Iraq war is going well and that the ranks are filled with contented soldiers.
The problem is with her follow-though.
For several nights in a row, for instance, she railed against the Detainee Bill – the law President Bush wanted passed to legitimize military trials for the terrorists in Guantanamo and which, for a while anyway, Congress resisted. A political battle was under way in D.C. and Katie was going to bring every spit and groan.
When the bill was finally approved last week, Katie and Co. passed it off with a short mention. Not good enough.
But it’s after the day’s big story that Katie’s newscast becomes the “Today” show in drag.
Occasionally, it is helped by the “Free Speech” segment.
Even though the segment fails more often than not, it does give a platform to folks who wouldn’t otherwise have a national platform.
The most talked-about Free Speech so far was Brian Rohrbough, father of a murdered Columbine kid, who came on right after the Amish murders this week. He blamed the rash of school massacres on the teaching of evolution in schools and the legal tolerance for abortion. The value of life, he said, had all gone to hell because of that.
While I am diametrically opposed to his message, Rohrbough delivered show-stopper TV.
Now if we could get Katie behind a desk instead of standing there posing like Nancy O’Dell-meets-“Next Top Model,” it would be even better.
In fact, the only time she seems to sit during the halfhour is at the end, when she perches selfconsciously on the edge of the desk.
Even Dan Rather never stooped to showing leg.