The Right State

Katie Couric is leaving NBC and the Today Show and is headed to CBS News to take Dan Rather’s old chair according to Fox News and the New York Times. Couric is reported going to make between $10 to 15 million a year for her new job.

What does this mean for CBS? Rather’s leanings to the left were well know and he did not hide his leftist views very well. Couric on the other partly, partly because of her much publicized run-ins with conservative writer Ann Coulter, is known to lean even further to the left and does not even attempt to hide her liberal leanings. The question is whether the new anchor of CBS will pull back her views enough to the right enough to be able to report news in a manor worthy of Ed Morrow. Doubtful, but we will be watching.

The other problem Couric will have is bringing back the tarnished reputation of the one-time king of news. Under Rather’s leadership, the news giant ran a fraudulent news story about President Bush and his Air National Guard stint just before the 2004 Presidential Election costing several people their jobs. Since then CBS has continued to lose viewers, plummeted in the ratings, and even now is in last place among the big three networks by a huge amount. The worst thing a news organization can do is to lose the trust of their viewers. The CBS News division has never recovered from this blatant attempt to influence the presidential election.

Couric has her work cut out for her. The success of CBS and Couric are now tied together. Where or not the viewers will lift CBS out of the doldrums of last place will in large measure be determined by whether or not the new news anchor can report just the news as news without adding bias. I wish her well.

Tags: Culture //