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CBS counts on Couric

The first of the Big Three networks with a solo female news anchor, CBS is betting on Katie Couric to reverse two decades of audience decline

Katie Couric is poised to make TV history. (Newsday/Andrew Eccles)

BY VERNE GAY | Newsday Staff Writer

September 4, 2006

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Just about midway through the past century, the guys who ran CBS decided to change the anchorman of the "Evening News."

Then as now, anchormen changes didn't happen with the flip of a coin, so there was a long debate about what to do. The bosses went through a long list of guys, but the news president at the time liked urbane Charles Collingwood, one of Edward R. Murrow's boys. The entertainment boss liked this slick, handsome, smart guy by the name of Mike Wallace or (if Mike wasn't available) a guy named Clete Roberts who was anchoring the local news in Los Angeles.

Lots of other guys were proposed, but failing to agree on any, CBS stuck with the guy who was already in the anchor chair, Douglas Edwards. What about Walter Cronkite? He wouldn't get his shot until seven years later, in 1962.

And so, in one brief but telling anecdote, you have much of the history of the network evening news institution from then until now: Guys deciding which other guys will give the news of the world to the American viewer.

A fundamental change

Admittedly, these guys usually chose wisely and well (and, by the way, even chose women to briefly enter the club as co-anchors - Barbara Walters, Connie Chung and Elizabeth Vargas). Nevertheless, whether you like Katie Couric or don't, think she's biased or not, think she's "perky" or serious, smart or frivolous, the right choice or the wrong, there is one indisputable fact everyone can agree on: She is a woman and the first female solo on one of the Big Three's weeknight broadcasts in TV history.

As such, Tuesday at 6:30 p.m., when the "Evening News" becomes "The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric," a TV institution isn't just undergoing a mere semantic change but a fundamental, symbolic one as well.

Consider that for most of their history, these Big Three newscasts thrived on the proposition that in the span of 22 minutes the viewer at home could get the whole wide world. It was a frivolous notion, perhaps even an illusion, but for it to succeed, each needed an anchorperson of probity, justice, fairness, sobriety, intelligence, broad experience and an ability to read a TelePrompTer. And until this Tuesday, he was almost always a "he."

In interviews, Couric has affected a sort of "oh really?" tone when the subject turns to her status as pioneer. At the recent TV critics' press tour, for example, she said "being the first woman was not the motivating factor for me to take on this new job ... although when my 10-year-old and my 14-year-old and I discussed it around the kitchen table, I do think my 10-year-old was channeling Helen Reddy because she said, 'Mom, you've got to do this. You're the first woman to do this job by yourself.' It's like, 'Where did you come from?'"

Where all of us came from, Katie, was out of the long shadow of Tom, Dan, Peter and, of course, Walter. "We all feel an enormous sense of responsibility," says Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports. "There is so much attention focused on what we're doing and it's such a major departure not just for CBS News but for the industry."

McManus would also be the first to admit (and does) that CBS, in fact, did not set out to strike a blow for women's equality in the anchor chair; he's attempting to fix an institution that has bled viewers and relevance. Although neither dead nor dying, all of the evening news broadcasts are nonetheless hobbled by circumstances beyond their control - their brevity and the time they air. Neither longtime viewers nor the networks any longer consider these broadcasts complete capsules of the day's news. They're in a fight for survival just like any other show on the schedule. CBS - paying Couric $15million a year, or significantly more than any of her male predecessors - believes she will drag viewers over to a broadcast that has remained stuck in third place since the late '80s.

News shows as symbols

But symbols are hard to kill, even harder to change, and these three shows very much remain vital symbols of the nation's commercial television broadcasting system, which turns 60 next year. How did they become so soaked in testosterone, and what are the prospects for a female in the anchor chair? Here's where the symbol turns into a puzzle.

Carole Simpson, the former anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight" Sunday editions (who left the network in January), has also been a longtime gadfly on the subject of anchor-chair equality: "I go all over the world and there are [solo] female anchors everywhere, including Muslim countries, and then you come back to the United States and say, 'Hello, what's happened here?' My God, I'm such an admirer of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings - they were fabulous - but it was just, like, time. It was time."

In the prehistoric era of network news, there were few female reporters, let alone anchors. (Female anchors on local TV didn't become commonplace until the early 1970s). The handful of female correspondents - such as Pauline Frederick, United Nations correspondent for ABC and NBC News from the '50s through the '70s - were never considered for anchor gigs.

And the woman who did become the first solo anchor of a weeknight newscast, ABC correspondent Marlene Sanders, did so only for one night in 1964, after the regular anchor called in sick.

"The medium is very cautious," says Sanders, now lecturing and teaching at New York University. "They never lead on anything - they follow - so it's finally safe to do this. They should have done this when I was subbing all those years ago. It would have been revolutionary. Now women are in positions of leadership everywhere [and] they're running for president. It's finally safe enough. They're nervous, cautious people."

McManus doesn't dispute that. "Part of the reason" a woman did not ascend to the anchor chair, "is that the jobs came up so infrequently," he says, and when they did, "no one was willing to take a chance that this was the right thing to do. There was a fear of the unknown. I would say that's the primary reason - plus the fact that the old system worked very well for a long time."

Linda Ellerbee, president of Lucky Duck Productions, the flagship of Nick News, and herself a pioneer in the '70s as co-anchor of "NBC News Overnight," explains that at least three reasons kept the glass ceiling largely intact. Foremost were "the basic economics of television. You fill the seats with mass audience. How do you do that? The first and easiest way is to not offend the viewer. So if the received wisdom is that men are superior in this job to women, then why screw with it? It was easier not to do. [But] Dan, Peter and Tom held those jobs and truthfully, this was not an issue for many years and there was no reason for it to be."

Ironically, when the networks did try female co-anchors - Walters in 1977 or Chung in 1993 - those experiments failed spectacularly, and possibly reinforced the bias against female network anchors in general. Says Ellerbee, "Every time one of the networks tried something and it didn't work, people would say, 'Well, I guess a woman won't work.' ... The problem with the co-anchor [experiments] was assumed to be the woman, but it was the pairing, and in both cases, neither wanted a co [anchor]."