Katie Couric Departs CBS Evening News Desk
Katie Couric has announced her departure from the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News, thus ending a 5-year-long experiment of whether someone best known for fluff interviews could fill Walter Cronkite's chair.
The answer has been, for quite some time, "no." Now Couric is moving on to engage in what she calls
"multi dimensional story telling." (WTF??? I thought that's what she had been doing all along!!!)The sad truth is that Couric never had the gravitas, that air of authority that was necessary to deliver the news, especially in the increasingly obsolete evening news format. At one time, before cable news and the Internet brought about access to the news 24/7, watching the evening news was as much of a ritual of life as working 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and eating dinner around the table with the wife and kids.
Walter Cronkite was the very model of a classic news anchor during the heyday of the CBS Evening News. Cronkite, with his grandfatherly mien and his dry, Midwestern delivery, was the voice of the news for 20 years. His name is forever associated with some of the great news stories of the era, including the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, the Apollo Moon landings, and Watergate. Cronkite was forced out in 1981 just shy of his 65th birthday under a then mandatory retirement policy at CBS.
Cronkite was followed by Dan Rather, a long time CBS News correspondent who had worked on the CBS newsmagazine show "60 Minutes." Whereas Cronkite was once "the most trusted man in America," Rather became known as the most irritating and petulant man in America. During the Rather era, the CBS Evening News suffered declining ratings. At one point, in 1987, Rather stomped off the air in a huff over a sports event cutting into his time on the air, leaving six minutes of dead air. A few months later, Rather conducted a painfully contentious interview with then Vice President George H. W. Bush in which he turned out to be the loser.
After a two-year experiment that paired Rather with Connie Chung, Rather's career went into a death spiral over a story in 2004 over then President George W. Bush's Air National Guard service that turned out to have been based on forged documents. Rather was forced out on the anchor chair within months of the story running.
Couric was chosen after Bob Schieffer, a CBS News reporter who at least had the air of venerable wisdom that Cronkite enjoyed, as an effort to reinvent the evening news with a younger style. Scott Pelley is said to be in the running to replace Couric.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110427/en_ac/8377201_katie_couric_departs_cbs_evening_news_desk_1 http://bcove.me/pzaigquu Rick's head will explode in....3....2....1
