No News Is Good News With COURIC Rumor

(From The San Francisco Chronicle -- By Tim Goodman)

The truly sad part about the rumors of KATIE COURIC becoming anchor of THE CBS EVENING NEWS -- now closing in on one year of whimsy in the ether, with six months to go --
is not that the end result would be Katie Couric as successor to DAN RATHER and WALTER CRONKITE.

It's this -- Katie Couric is not a revolution.

Wake us up when you get OPRAH.

Or import KEITH OLBERMANN and COUNTDOWN from cable.

Or burn the whole building down with JON STEWART's DAILY SHOW starting a synergy fire.

Because there has been such substantial buzz about Couric jumping from NBC's TODAY SHOW to CBS and thus becoming this country's first solo female anchor of a broadcast network newscast, it's clear that any real thinking -- any real ideas about change as it relates to the network news dinosaur --
is not on the docket.

Sad, that.

LES MOONVES -- is that all you've got?

Moonves is the head of CBS, a man who once said that network news had to be revolutionized, rethought, repackaged.

And make no mistake about it -- news division bosses like SEAN McMANUS at CBS and STEVE CAPUS at NBC or DAVID WESTIN at ABC will not be making the decisions that lead to any kind of revolution. It will be their bosses -- way up the corporate media chain, like Moonves -- who decide when the bell has rung on the old school.

What a strange world we live in.

We get to read about how technology is changing everything -- from IPODS and the music industry to NETFLIX and the descending price of HDTV damaging the movie business, to unrelenting navel-gazing about how the Internet is damaging newspapers -- all the while talk emanating from the world's biggest media companies tells us that archaic, failing models of information delivery will continue to limp on into oblivion, except for the occasional "fresh" coat of paint -- hello Katie.

Television news programs in particular are keen on fear of change. No one wants to break the model until the whole thing has gone bust, apparently.

Avoidance of a revolution is everywhere.

ABC wanted NIGHTLINE gone so it could woo DAVID LETTERMAN and put entertainment, not news, in that slot.

Then TED KOPPEL leaves and ABC keeps a news program in that slot -- NIGHTLINE Version 2.0 -- that is A) Inferior to Koppel's show and B) Exactly like any other news magazine show ever dreamed up.

Moral? Be careful what you wish for -- you might get it and choke.

No News Is Good News With Couric Rumor